


Your Way Up to the Light

by thepartyresponsible



Series: Do Every Stupid Thing [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bat Family, Canon-Typical Violence, Interrogation, M/M, Phil Coulson Has the Patience of a Saint, Platonic Cuddling, Suicidal Thoughts, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-01-26 22:03:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12567196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepartyresponsible/pseuds/thepartyresponsible
Summary: “That woman you’re looking for,” Batman says, without preamble. “She’s in Gotham.” There is a brief silence while Phil processes that, and then Batman adds a slightly subdued, “Good morning.”“Good morning,” Phil says. Manners, as he is constantly reminding Jason, are free. “Are you requesting SHIELD assistance?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is for everyone who asked for more Natasha. 
> 
> And this is also for Atjas, who asked for the Batfamily talking up Jason's good points. That's not exactly what happens here, but they do (kind of) make an effort. 
> 
> Title taken from "Amy A.K.A Spent Gladiator I" by The Mountain Goats.

 

                Phil’s alarm goes off at 5:55. Batman calls him at 5:56, which leaves Phil with the uncomfortable idea that Batman knows what time his alarm goes off, and waited until Phil was awake to call him. The last time Batman called Phil, he wasn’t nearly as considerate.

                Phil answers the call and holds the phone to his ear, hoping that the consideration is an indication of a lesser emergency. “Phil Coulson,” he says.

                “That woman you’re looking for,” Batman says, without preamble. “She’s in Gotham.” There is a brief silence while Phil processes that, and then Batman adds a slightly subdued, “Good morning.”

                “Good morning,” Phil says. Manners, as he is constantly reminding Jason, are free. “Are you requesting SHIELD assistance?”

                He’d asked the same thing last time.

_Are you requesting SHIELD assistance?_

_No. I need you to tell me if Red Hood’s behind this._

                “I am not requesting assistance.”

Phil supposes that’s better than last time, although still not particularly helpful. “Then I’m not sure why you’re calling.”

                The silence stretches so long that Phil thinks Batman hung up on him. He’s about to say something, test the connection, when Batman finally speaks. “The woman you’re looking for,” he says, again. “She’s in Gotham.”

                The woman in question – the Black Widow, the redheaded spy – been causing complications for the past two years. Phil’s been collecting data on her since his unit formed, but all he has on her is a worryingly extensive list of probable kills, a tenuous connection to Hydra, and a series of failed attempts to capture or kill her.

                Bucky seems to know something about her that he doesn’t feel inclined to share. And Jason had said, once, off-hand, while leaning his chair back, feet propped up on Phil’s desk, “Oh, yeah, she’s the shithead that shot Robin awhile back. Which I take pretty personally. If anyone’s gonna kill that spooky little bastard, it’s me.”

                It had seemed incongruous even then, the nonchalance Jason was projecting. Phil’s seen Jason be indifferent to any number of things, but never to violence. And Phil’s doubts about the sincerity of Jason’s indifference to Robin were verified two months ago, when Batman called Phil at 3:00am to report that someone had stolen Robin in the middle of his patrol. Left nothing of him behind, except a domino mask and a blood-spattered joker card.

                “And if we go to Gotham,” Phil says, carefully, “to retrieve her, will you--”

                “We’ll help you.” Batman says, brisk. “This time, this woman. That’s it.”

                Phil understands that this is some kind of exchange.

                Jason had mentioned this might happen. After he found Robin and returned him to Gotham, he’d come back cagey and sullen. He’d spat in the face of the man from payroll who’d asked if that was family leave or vacation time. He’d picked a fight with _Clint_. Phil had considered requisitioning heavy sedatives.

                And then, after Bucky returned from his mission and took Jason down to the basement-level gym and they both came back marked up in ways Coulson feels no inclination to think about too deeply, Jason had settled into the chair in Phil’s office to drink Phil’s coffee and bitch about his former mentor.

                “I told the old man he didn’t owe me a Goddamn thing. I didn’t fucking do it for _him,_ you know?” He’d said, glaring down at his empty coffee cup until Phil finally refilled it for him. “But he might do something. I dunno. Just fucking—be aware that Batman might be in our shit for a while. He’s not good at owing people anything. He’ll try to settle up. He’ll be a fucking asshole about it.”

                Jason hadn’t been especially tolerant of perceived debts, either, in the beginning. But he’s been slowly acclimating to the idea that teamwork doesn’t necessarily run on some bizarre barter economy. He’s adjusting to the concept that you don’t have to pay your teammates back; you just have to be a team.

                Phil’s not sure that this woman is worth the kind of debt that Batman owes them. And he’s not sure he wants to take his team into Gotham to settle that debt in the first place.

                “You are aware,” he says, “that our objective is to execute her?”

                “If you do that,” Batman says, immediately, “we will not work together again.”

                Phil wonders if he’s being played. He wonders if Batman is testing them, or just looking for a reason to write them off. He wonders if Batman _wants_ them out of Gotham, permanently, and the most efficient way he’s found is to let them alienate themselves.

                Phil could point out that her list of crimes virtually guarantees that _someone_ is going to execute her. If she’s not put to death in the U.S., she’ll be extradited to some other nation, a favor thrown in to sweeten whatever diplomatic negotiation takes precedence at the time.

                But it’s not his job to get into complex philosophical discussions with Batman about the significance of the difference between being complicit in a murder, and being an active participant in one.

                And it is, after all, just _barely_ 6:00 in the morning.

                “Alright,” he says, instead. “We’ll be there this afternoon.”

                This time, Batman _does_ hang up on him, and Phil puts his phone down with a sigh.

                He wonders, for one brief, wonderfully optimistic moment, if he can get away with just taking one of the snipers, and leaving Jason out of this entirely.

 

 

 

                Clint calls them at 6:45 in the morning, on their day off, and Jason would be pissed about that, but Clint loves sleeping in even more than he does.

                “Hey. Get up, get dressed. We’re on our way,” Clint says, all business. And then, with a resigned sigh, he adds, “Sounds like we’ve got some weird Gotham bullshit to deal with.”

“Fuck you, you fuck.” Jason grumbles back, and then throws the phone off the bed and tries to drag Bucky back on top of him. “Just a telemarketer. Go back to sleep.”

                “Gotham.” Bucky says, frowning down at the phone. “You want to sit this one out?”

                “I cannot believe,” Jason says, incredulous, “that you are fucking _listening in_ on my private conversations with a coworker. The lack of trust in this relationship is what’s gonna tear us apart.”

                “Mhm,” Bucky hums, agreeably, and then kisses him before climbing out of bed. “I’ll handle it. Stay here. Get some rest. Maybe don’t try to patrol the neighborhood again in the middle of the night. This is a safe area, Jason. People think you’re a creep.”

                “First of all, this place is safe because I make it that way.” Jason, eyes still stubbornly closed, hooks an arm around Bucky’s waist and tugs, toppling him back into bed. “Second of all, that’s my weird bullshit city. _You_ sit this one out.”

                 “We probably don’t have to go.” Bucky says, running a hand down Jason’s back. “We can just say no.”

                “And let Jailbait and Coulson get offed by some low-level costumed shithead?” Jason huffs and finally opens his eyes, just so Bucky can watch him roll them. “Where’s your loyalty, Barnes?”

                “To you.” Bucky says, so Goddamn earnest that Jason has to crawl out of bed immediately, barely getting his feet under him in time to avoid face-planting into the carpet.

                “Fuck,” Jason says, scrubbing a hand across his face. “Fuck you with that shit. It’s not even 7:00am. Don’t talk to me that way.”

                Bucky smirks up at him, unbelievably pleased with himself. “Yeah,” he says, smirk widening into a grin. “Thought that would get you out of bed.”

                “You’re such an asshole,” Jason tells him, and heads off to take a shower. If Bucky wants to be shitty, he can do the packing.

 

 

               

                Clint watches as Jason and Bucky lock up their house and then walk up the driveway. They seem fine, but there’s a weird set to Jason’s mouth that doesn’t bode well.

                Jason falls into the backseat while Bucky’s stowing their bags in the trunk, and Clint twists around in his seat to stare down at him. “Hey,” he says, “you know you don’t have to come, right?”

                “Fuck off, Jailbait.” Jason says, and kicks the back of Clint’s seat. “I’m trying to sleep.”

                “I mean, if you think he’s just doing this to fuck with you.” Clint says. “We can handle it. It’s just that one girl.”

                “Yeah, just that one girl.” Jason says, rolling his eyes. “That one girl that _shot_ Robin.”

                “And kidnapped you.” Bucky says, climbing in. Jason lifts up from his sprawl just long enough for Bucky to get settled, and then he falls back down, head in Bucky’s lap.

                “She barely kidnapped me.” Jason argues. “There were about six other people involved.”

                “There were four.” Bucky argues. “And Clint killed two of them.”

                “Well, what do you know about it?” Jason says. “You were knocked the fuck out the whole time.”

                Clint remembers that night. He remembers the weird confrontation on the rooftop, how angry Jason had been. He remembers tracking the skyline, finding where Bucky was liking hiding out, ready to take the shot to splatter Coulson’s brains on the concrete.

                Clint doesn’t like to think about that. The rest of the evening – following them home, watching the Hydra agents almost kill Stark twice and then load Jason in the back of the ambulance – doesn’t rank among his best times ever, either. But the first part had been worse.

                Clint starts going through the coffee Coulson had picked up on the way over, squinting at the labels to figure out what belongs to who. As he hands Jason’s back to Bucky, he says, “Just seems like she tried to kidnap you _and_ Robin. And it only worked on one of you.”

                “Suck a dick, Jailbait. I was a little distracted by being _blown up_.”

                “My _point_ is,” Clint continues, “that maybe we just drop you off at the airport, and Stark flies you out to California for the weekend.”

                “Okay,” Jason says, sitting up. He leans forward, shoulders shoved between their seats, and Clint watches the way Coulson’s eyes flicker to the rearview to meet Bucky’s. “Listen up. We’re doing a team huddle. Buck, get in here.”

                “Jason,” Bucky starts, sounding dubious.

                Without looking, Jason snakes a hand back, grabs Bucky’s shirt, and tugs him forward. “I,” he says, “am not fucked up about this. I am _fine_ about this. We are going to Gotham, and we’re gonna work with that shithead, and everything’s fine. Okay? It’s fine.”

                A tense silence settles over the car, and Clint wonders if Coulson’s thinking about how spectacularly this is all going to go to shit. Judging by Jason’s tone alone, Coulson’s going to be filling out paperwork about the upcoming fallout for _months_.

                Clint figures that, a year ago, if Coulson had told Jason to stay out of this mission, Jason would’ve beaten them there. By the time the rest of the team showed up, Jason would be dumping the woman’s body in some shitty area off Gotham Harbor, and they’d get out of the car just in time to watch Batman tackle him into the water.

                Jason, Clint’s noticed, is not great at listening. But he thinks if Coulson did it now, if Coulson told him to get out of the car and go back to bed or go see Tony, he’d do it. Not graciously, but he’d do it.

                The shitty thing is that Jason tolerates getting yelled at for disobeying an order a _lot_ better than he tolerates being left behind. Whatever happens in Gotham, assuming they all walk out with a pulse, it’s got to be better than dealing with Jason, nursing a rejection grudge, for the next dozen missions or so.

                “Hey, Jay,” Clint says, to break the tension. “You think there’s a way to convince Batman to stop booty-calling Coulson at ass o’clock in the morning?”

                “Yeah, sure,” Jason says, and he leans back against the seat. He still hasn’t buckled himself in – probably because he knows it’s pissing Phil off – but at least he’s drinking the coffee. “We just shoot Batman in the face.”

                “No.” Coulson says, with unusual vehemence. “Absolutely not.”

                “Goddamn, Coulson,” Jason says, wonderingly, as Clint turns to blink at Coulson. “Are you sweet on him? Is it the cape? The calves? The surly disposition?”

                “If we kill Batman,” Coulson says, patiently, “SHIELD will have to open an office in Gotham. And which team, do you think, would be put in charge of running it?”

                Jason sighs. “ _Fine._ Fuck. We won’t kill Batman.”

                “I’m sure he’ll be very relieved to hear that,” Coulson says.

 

 

 

                Batman splits them up on arrival. Coulson lets it happen, so Bucky does not object. Jason does, but only once, when Batman tries to partner Bucky with Robin. Jason makes an aggrieved noise, puts his hands on Bucky’s shoulders, and turns him to face a baffled but gamely-grinning Nightwing instead.

                “Fuck off, Bats,” Jason says. “I don’t want Replacement trying to steal anything else from me.”

                “Gross.” Robin says, with feeling, and then shrugs apologetically when Bucky raises an eyebrow at him. “Sorry. I realize that sounded like a reaction to you. It wasn’t. It’s just that the idea of touching anyone who’s touched him is deeply nauseating.”

                Bucky’s still not sure what to make of Jason and Robin. There is a lot of rage in Jason, and some of it seems genuinely aimed Robin’s way. He knows Jason shot him, although he tries not to dwell on that. He knows they can’t be in a room together without devolving into bickering adolescents.

                He also knows that when Robin went missing, Jason walked away from a mission to get him back. He hadn’t asked Bucky to come with him. He’d barely told Bucky he was leaving. He got the phone call from Phil, and, minutes later, he was gone. Bucky disentangled himself from the mission and went chasing after him, caught up just in time to hear the gunshots and screams.

                He’d found Jason crouched over Robin. When Bucky walked into the room, Jason had leveled his guns right at Bucky’s heart, a look on his face that Bucky has no interest in ever seeing again.

                Whatever’s between Jason and Robin is volatile, at best. Bucky doesn’t want Jason anywhere near him, and he hadn’t been especially thrilled about spending time with him, either.

                But Clint takes this – and most things – far less personally than anyone else. He’ll be fine with Robin.

                “Me and you, Barnes,” Nightwing says, a friendly hand curling around Bucky’s shoulder. “You need to stretch before we head out? We won the active area of Gotham.”

                “Okay,” Jason says, scowling at Nightwing. “To be clear. You don’t get to fuck him either.”

                “Red Hood,” Batman says, in that heavy way he always says it.

                “No one’s fucking anyone.” Coulson says, and Bucky’s going to buy him something nice, just for the casual, calm way he speaks right over the top of Batman and kills the tension in Jason’s shoulders before it has a chance to settle. “Any DNA we collect, we are obligated to report.”

                That startles a laugh out of Jason, high and bright. There are too many teeth in the smile that comes after, but the laughter is real.

                “Robin can work with the Hawkeye.” Batman says. “Red Hood, you’ll work with me.”

                “Oh, adult supervision.” Nightwing says, with sympathy. “Sorry, Jay.”

                Jason levels a look at Batman, and Bucky thinks the whole operation is going to fall apart before it even starts, but then Jason just shoves his hands in his pockets and jerks his chin toward Coulson. “Adult supervision, huh?” He says. “So Coulson’s on our team?”

                “Absolutely.” Coulson says, before anyone manages to say anything else.

                Batman turns to glower at Coulson, and Coulson just smiles at him, polite and peaceful, uncowed.

                Bucky’s going to have to talk to Tony about buying Coulson his own Starbucks store. Or, possibly, the entire corporation.

 

 

 

                It’s not unpleasant, working with Nightwing. He reminds Bucky of Jason, a little, in the way he likes to show off, and in how he genuinely seems to enjoy the work they do, albeit for reasons that are very different from Jason’s.

                The people in the area know and trust him. Bucky envies that, a little, which is something he didn’t expect.

                One little girl comes running down a fire escape to talk to Nightwing, and Bucky stays below, staring up in disbelief, while she asks Nightwing to find her missing cat.

                “He’s small,” she tells Nightwing. “He’s gonna be scared. Sometimes he bites.”

                “Got it, kiddo,” Nightwing says, smiling reassuringly. “If I find him, I’ll bring him home. But you gotta get back inside. It’s cold out.”

                “His name’s Joker,” she says and grimaces at the look Nightwing gives her. “My brother named him.”

                “Brothers,” Nightwing says, and heads back down the fire escape.

                They’re caught in a slow moment, just after sundown. It’s that quiet, transitional time. Bucky imagines things will liven up considerably in an hour or so.

                “You have any siblings?” Nightwing asks. He’s hanging upside down, and there seems to be an almost wistful slant to his mouth.

                “Maybe.” Bucky says. There’s no reason to be evasive. His family is a matter of public record. But Bucky’s not sure that it’s any of Nightwing’s business. And, even if it is, it still feels strange, claiming the life of a man who, for all intents and purposes, died in 1945.

                Bucky took the name, but he’s not really James Buchannan Barnes. He’s not the Winter Soldier, either. Whoever he is, he doesn’t have siblings. But then, as far as Bucky knows, Nightwing doesn’t have any siblings, either.

                “Tell me about this girl.” Nightwing says. “She’s Hydra?”

                “No.” Bucky says, although he’s not tied to that. She _might_ be. She seems to be anything she needs to be, at any given moment. “She works for them, sometimes. She’ll work with anyone, I think.”

                Nightwing goes still, hanging upside and peering thoughtfully up at Bucky. “You think killing the weapon is gonna end the threat?”

                From Batman, that would’ve been a challenge. And if Nightwing said that to Jason, there’d be a fight. But Bucky decides to treat it as an honest question. He is, after all, uniquely prepared to answer.

                “No. But I think it’s one way to mitigate the damage.”

                “I’m glad,” Nightwing says, flipping down off the fire escape and landing, lightly, right in front of Bucky, “that Jay didn’t kill you. I know that was probably his plan, when he went down there. I know he probably got close. I’m glad he didn’t.”

                Bucky blinks. He’s not sure what to do with that. “Thanks,” he says, finally.

                “Oh,” Nightwing says, and waves a hand, laughing suddenly. “Shit. I mean, yeah. Of course I’m glad he didn’t kill you, because you’re still alive, and that’s great. But I meant for him. I’m glad _for him_ that you’re still around. You’re good for him.”

                It’s true. Objectively, Bucky knows that. He wouldn’t have stayed with Jason and Tony if he didn’t do both of them some good. It’s a burden, he knows, being around him sometimes. If that’s all he was, he would’ve left a long time ago.

                “Thanks,” he says, again.

                Nightwing smiles and shakes his head. “I’m fucking this up.” There’s an ease to him that Bucky wishes he could’ve shared with Jason.

                “Look,” Nightwing says, “I know you probably hate us. I don’t blame you. We fucked him up. And I know he mostly blames B for that, but it was a group effort. I didn’t do enough. I resented him, I think, and I didn’t pay enough attention. But I’m glad he has you, and Stark. And SHIELD. You’re better for him than we were.”

                The kind thing to do would be to refute that. Bucky knows that. But he keeps his mouth shut. He thinks, out of all of Batman’s allies, he likes Nightwing the best. But he hasn’t forgiven any of them just yet.

                “He saved Robin.” Nightwing says, like he still doesn’t fully believe it. “He never would’ve done that, before you two.”

                “He would have.” Bucky says, because he remembers what Jason was like, in the very beginning. He remembers the anger and the cynicism and the brutal practicality, the way he’d put his hands around Bucky’s throat and seemed a heartbeat or two away from strangling him or breaking his neck. And he remembers what stopped him.

                “He would have,” Bucky says, remembering the way Jason folded, every single time Stark intervened, “if you’d asked.”

 

 

 

                Nobody calls Tony, but nobody has to. He gets the alert of unusual activity in Gotham, and he skims the news reports while he brings his latest project to a point where he can walk away for a few days without having to worry about it accidentally incinerating a significant portion of southern California.

                He throws some clothes in a bag, some tech in another bag, and calls the pilot he keeps on staff for when Bucky and Jason are on missions. He’s in Gotham just after daybreak.

                “Hey, Pennyworth,” Tony says, when Alfred opens the door. Tony treats him to his single most dazzling smile, and is not the least bothered by the slow, unimpressed blink he gets in return. “Are they here?”

                “Mr. Stark,” Alfred says, in that gloriously long-suffering tone that reminds Tony so much of Jarvis. “They are not. Primarily because I believe one of them is still feigning ignorance as to Mr. Wayne’s involvement.”

                “Yeah, Bucky’s the sweet one,” Tony says. “So can I stay here until one of them shows up?”

                Alfred crosses his arms over his chest and frowns. “It is actually standard practice to be invited into someone’s home.” Alfred tells him. “By a resident.”

                “That Tony?” Tim says, suddenly, popping up over Alfred’s shoulder.

                Tony levels that same PR grin at Tim. “Hey, Tim,” he says. “Your bouncer’s not letting me in.”

                Tim hesitates. “Does Bruce know you’re here?”

                Tony shrugs. Bruce has trackers on Tony’s jets that he probably thinks Tony doesn’t know about yet, and, even if he didn’t, he probably would’ve known to expect Tony within hours of the news of Red Hood in Gotham. But Tony figures that question was mostly rhetorical anyway.

“Got new Stark tech for you to play with.” Tony says, nodding toward one of his bags.

                There’s a second where Tim hesitates, but then he’s sliding around Alfred to take the bag off Tony’s shoulder. “You need breakfast?” He asks, as he hustles Tony back inside, unzipping the bag so he can start looking before they’re even fully through the door. “Alfred can bring it to the cave.”

 

 

 

                “I ran patrol with Hawkeye last night.” Tim tells him, an hour or so later. He’s sitting cross-legged at one of Batman’s computers, and Tony’s dissecting a few of Batman’s newest gadgets so he can Frankenstein in pieces of Stark tech. 

                “That a euphemism?” Tony asks, hopeful. “Jason and I have money on what Hawkeye’s into.”

                “Not a euphemism.” Tim says, mouth flattening out into an unimpressed frown. Tony blinks and then starts to grin, and Tim doubles down, furrows his brow up and _scowls_. “Stark--”

                “Now, Tim,” Tony says, holding his hands up placatingly and trying to bite back a grin, “you’re a growing boy. Your body’s going through some changes. It’s perfectly natural to--”

                “I’m going to tell Bruce you’re here.” Tim threatens.

                “Oh, please.” Tony says. “You bring him down here, and I’ll just tell him you’ve got a crush on a boy, and he’ll fucking break the sound barrier on his way out the door. Empty threat, Tim. Try again.”

                “I don’t have a crush.” Tim says. His eyes narrow further. “Will you just focus on the task at hand?”

                “Hawkeye’s a great choice.” Tony says, encouragingly. “He’s a sweet kid. You two could have fun together. Why not?”

                “We ran patrol together,” Tim says, stubbornly carrying on even while a faint blush settles over his cheeks, “and we talked about Jason.”

                Tony feels the smirk slide off his face, and he considers Tim for a moment. The Bats are hard to keep pinned down and next to impossible to figure out. They play by a set of rules they’d made up on their own, and never shared with anybody else.

                It’s hard to tell if Tim is just using Jason to redirect Tony, or if he genuinely wants to talk about Jason.

                “Yeah?” Tony says, because he figures, as uncomfortable as Tim is discussing his potential infatuation with Barton, talking about Jason has to be worse. “You want to talk to me about Jason?”

                “He’s changed.” Tim says. He glances at the computer screen and then at the table and then looks up at Tony like he’s not sure how to say the next part. “I used to follow him, when I was a kid. When he was Robin. I’d follow him around, and take pictures. I thought he was amazing.”

                Tony tips his head back. “So this lack of appropriate parental supervision,” he says, “that’s been a running theme in your life, huh?”

                “Jason should never have been Robin.” Tim says. Tony doesn’t say anything, but his face must screw up something awful, because Tim hurries to go on. “It’s not—what Robin is, Jason isn’t. I don’t mean—it’s not an insult. I wouldn’t make a good Red Hood.”

                “You got a point, boy genius?” Tony says. “Because it kinda sounds like you’re about to shit-talk my boyfriend.”

                “I’m not.” Tim says. He runs a hand through his hair and then shrugs. “It’s not a value judgement.  Jason was never going to be a good Robin, and Batman made a mistake, trying to make him into one.”

                Tony sets everything down carefully, spread out across the table, and tells himself not to throw any of this tech at Tim’s face.

                For one, Tim’s still just a teenager.

                And, also, Tony’s worked with him a few times now, and Jason is the only person Tim ever seems to want to argue with. He can’t imagine that he’s trying to pick a fight with Tony right now.

                “It was cruel.” Tim says, suddenly. When Tony looks at him, there’s nothing on his face but a small, tense frown. “I think the last thing Todd needed was to fail all over again. He was already angry enough.”

                Jason _is_ angry. Tony knows. He can almost feel it, sometimes. He’s certainly seen the effects of it. But Tony’s angry, too. And so is Bucky. And they have a _right_ to be angry.

                “There’s nothing wrong with being angry.” Tony says. “Jason’s never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

                Tim’s frown deepens. He shrugs, and there’s something sad in the way he looks at Tony. “He shot me.” He says. “I didn’t deserve that.”

                “Well.” Tony says, because, admittedly, that’s a hard thing to reconcile. “Well, fuck.”

                “But Hawkeye said the same thing.” Tim says it like it’s the missing piece in a puzzle Tony didn’t know they were putting together. “He sees everything, and you’re one of the smartest people I know. So if you both believe it, then I think, as long as you two have known him, it’s been true.”

                Tony stares at him, and tries to figure out where the hell this conversation is going. It’s impossible. As far as Tony’s been able to discern, only Bats can really understand other Bats.

                “What’re you trying to tell me, kid?” He says.

                Tim’s got a weird way of holding his face that reminds Tony of Bucky, back when he was first crawling his way out of the Winter Soldier’s brain. Sometimes, Tony can read him, and, sometimes, there’s nothing there to read.

                “I used to think there was no salvaging him, after he came back as Red Hood.” Tim says. “But I don’t think that anymore.”

                Tony takes a breath and lets it out. _Only Bats can really understand other Bats_ , he thinks. In Bat-speak, that was probably a declaration of undying love and loyalty.

                “That’s good.” Tony says. “Because Alfred would probably stop making me cookies if I kicked your ass.”

 

 

 

                Just before noon, Bruce Wayne comes looming down into the cave and stares pointedly at Tim until Tim sighs and steps away from the computer. “Fine.” He says. “I’ll sleep.”

                It surprises a sharp bark of laughter out of Tony, but he covers it quickly – if not particularly effectively – with a cough. He ducks his head and keeps tinkering with the new rebreather he’d found during a casual stroll around the cave earlier.

                “I cannot believe,” Tony says, once Tim’s disappeared into the elevator, “that he has a _bedtime_.”

                “He’s a teenager.” Bruce tells him, flat. Tony’s seen dead bodies more emotive than Bruce Wayne. “Teenagers need sleep.”

                “ _Humans_ need sleep.” Tony points out. “Guess that explains why you don’t seem to know much about it.”

                Bruce doesn’t even blink, but his focus sharpens. “You shouldn’t be down here.”

                “Yeah, good try, but Jason plays that game too.” Tony says. He leans away from the rebreather, but he keeps his soldering iron in hand.

                “What game is that?” Bruce asks. He folds his arms across his chest and frowns, and Tony can see that he’s meant to be intimidated, but he doesn’t feel anything but angry.

                “The game where he doesn’t want to fight about one thing, so he’ll start a fight about something else. If you had a problem with me being here, you’d have stopped me before I even got to the Manor. So let’s stay focused on the real problem.”

                “And what,” Bruce says, “is the real problem?”

                “Seems like that’s probably you.” Tony says. “Seems like you fuck up a lot of people.”

                Bruce considers that for a moment. “That new ICBM that SI came out with,” he says, and Tony doesn’t flinch, but he has to put the soldering iron down to prevent himself from trying to stab Bruce in the face with it. “I hear you broke the maximum range record. 16,500 kilometers, was it? Accuracy’s something like 350 CEP?”

                “300.” Tony says. “It’ll drop.”

                Bruce nods. “It will.” He says it like he believes it, but not like it makes anything better.

                “What’s your point? That I fuck people up too?” Tony says. “Wayne, I design weapons for the military. For real grownups, with guns and training. I’m talking about these kids you keep treating to lifelong emotional problems. Can you even see the difference between orphaned kids and enemy combatants?”

                “At 16,500 kilometers,” Bruce says, “can you?”

                Tony curls his hand into a fist the way Bucky taught him. He thinks, self-righteous son of a bitch that Bruce is, he’s probably going to let Tony have one punch. He resolves to make it worth it.

                “I never wanted Jason to be a murderer.” Brue says, and it startles Tony enough that he momentarily forgets he was about to punch him right in the mouth. “It’s not the answer.”

                “It’s _an_ answer, asshole.” Tony says. “And he’s not a fucking murderer. Don’t say that about him again.”

                “I failed him.” Bruce says. “I regret that. I—”

                “I don’t give a fuck how you feel about it.” Tony says. He doesn’t want to stand here and listen to Bruce’s justifications. “He deserved better than you.”

                “He did.” Bruce says, evenly, like it doesn’t even hurt to say.

                Tony sighs and runs a hand through his hair, probably smearing grease and soot over his face in the process. “Well.” He says. “You’re what he has. So get your shit together, Wayne. That thing with Tim was a step in the right direction. It was decent of you, telling him Tim was missing.”

                Bruce blinks. For a second, Tony sees something cross his face that looks disturbingly like confusion. “Right.” Bruce says, after a pause. “He was very helpful.”

                It occurs to Tony that something has just happened, but he can’t for the life of him figure out what the hell it was. “Alright, Uncanny Valley,” he says, “Cave’s all yours. I’m gonna go get some sleep, like humans do. And, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to fuck off.”

               

 

 

                Clint thinks Robin might have a bit of a thing for him, but he’s not completely sure. He adopts some of Stark’s teachings and tests the hypothesis by wearing the tightest pants he brought and a shirt with no sleeves.

                Coulson assesses him with raised eyebrows. “You’ll be cold.” He says, and he’s right, but Clint’s been colder. Hell, before he met Coulson, he was cold for about six months out of every year.

                “The thrill of scientific discovery will keep me warm.” Clint says, as he checks his arrows.

                “That line didn’t work when Stark said it, either.”

                “Oh, I don’t know.” Bucky says, grinning down at the knife he’s sharpening. “It worked on me.”

                Coulson rolls his eyes a little, which Clint takes as a sign that last night’s patrol with Batman and Jason wasn’t half as fun as the evening Clint spent with Robin. “Where’s Jason?” Coulson asks.

                Bucky shrugs and stands up, sheathing his knife and stretching out his shoulders. “Not sure. He left a little after noon, said he wanted to see if Tony had found his way to Batman’s place yet.”

                Clint wouldn’t be surprised if Tony’s figured out they’re in Gotham. Tony’s smart, and more than a little he’s obsessed with Bucky and Jason. If Bucky didn’t have bad memories of it, Tony probably would’ve planted subdermal trackers in both of them months ago.

                “Stark’s here?” Coulson says, slowly. He seems to feel a few different ways about that, but Clint thinks most of them are positive. “And Jason’s already been in proximity to Batman for six hours?” Coulson’s feelings about that are less complicated; Clint can read his annoyance in the slight tightening of his jaw.

                “He’ll be fine.” Bucky says. “He’s with Tony.”

                And that’s fair, Clint thinks, because what Jason needs between him and Batman is something flashy and loud, someone that’ll keep Jason’s attention. And what Batman needs between him and Jason is someone who checks Jason’s more brutal impulses, who can shame Jason into playing nice just by being in the same room.

                Of course, it’s not a perfect system. Tony doesn’t like Batman all that much. And he’s not mean like Jason is, but Clint’s seen him be vicious, and cruel.

                “We should go.” Clint says.

                “In a hurry?” Coulson asks, and the way he says it makes Clint think he’s already dreading another long night.

                “Sure.” Clint says, with a shrug. “I think I’ve got a date.”

 

 

 

                When they split up that night, they’re sent out with comms transmitting Tony’s voice. Clint’s used to that, because Tony will hack his way into their ops, sometimes, if he thinks they need his guidance. But it keeps throwing Robin, who nearly gets decked in the face because Tony makes a dick joke to Batman sometime around midnight.

                “Gotta tune him out.” Clint advises. He grabs the mugger by the neck and hauls him away from Robin, but he changes his grip to the man’s wrists when he sees the frown forming on Robin’s face.

                “Sorry,” Clint says, as he knocks the man to his knees and then hands him off to Robin so he can handcuff him. “Forgot we’re being gentle.”

                “That’s going to bruise.” Robin says, tipping his head toward the mugger’s throat.

                And, sure. It absolutely will. “He almost hit you in the face.”

                “He did not.” Robin says. He finishes handcuffing the man, hooks the cuffs to a nearby lamppost, and goes for his radio so he can alert GPD.

                “Okay,” Clint says, with a shrug, because it had sure as hell _looked_ like a near miss, but none of these Gotham costumes move the way they’re supposed to. “Well, I don’t appreciate that he tried.”

                Robin gives him a strange look, and Clint smiles back. Robin _definitely_ has a thing for him.

                Roaming around with Jason and Bucky, Clint doesn’t usually get much attention. Jason’s louder, and Bucky’s better looking, and Clint’s the sniper, so it’s not like he spends much time with people anyway. He likes it, he thinks. The attention. Also, Robin.

                “Barnes and Nightwing are chasing pussy.” Tony says, suddenly. Robin’s jaw tightens instead of falling open in shock, and Clint thinks that’s sweet, how he thinks, somehow, one’s a giveaway but the other isn’t. “Repeat,” Tony says, “Barnes and Nightwing are chasing---”

                “I can block his transmission.” A woman’s voice says through the comm. “If he says anything actually useful, I’ll patch it through, but—oh, hell.”

                “Ha!” Tony crows into the comm, so triumphant that Clint knows he’s just done something both incredibly impressive and incredibly shitty. “I _knew_ it. I knew there was someone else. Hi, hello, nice to meet you. I’m Tony Stark. Are you Oracle?”

                “Can we kill him?” The woman asks. “After I figure out how he did that. Can we kill him?”

                “You’ve got your own Tony?” Clint asks.

                Robin shrugs, but there’s a tiny smile hooking up one corner of his mouth. “I told her he’d figure it out.”

                “People underestimate Tony.” Clint says, with a nod. “Because he’s an asshole who can’t get his life together. But I figure, if my brain ran twelve directions at once, I’d be a shitshow, too.”

                “I doubt it.” Robin says, and then he clears his throat and stares grimly at the Gotham skyline, and Clint almost asks him if he wants to see a movie sometime.

                “Cat recovered.” Bucky says, suddenly, breaking up the increasingly technical verbal death-match between Tony and the unidentified woman on the comms.

                “It was an actual, literal feline, if anyone’s wondering.” Nightwing confirms. “Pussy chasing done for the evening.”

                “Oh, it’s barely midnight,” Tony says, and his tone is a little recriminating. “I know you’ve got more stamina than that.”

                “Wouldn’t count on it.” Jason says. “You know Nightwing. All flash, and no bang.”

                Robin rolls his eyes and gets back to work, jogging away right as the GPD lights come into view. Clint follows, and it’s the same as last night. They work well together. Robin’s a better fighter than him, and he’s smart, and he’s absolutely fearless, but Clint’s sees more than he does, tracks threats Robin hasn’t clocked yet.

                He steals one of Robin’s Batarangs and sends it spinning right into the tire of an oncoming van, makes it crash into a brick wall instead of Robin, and Robin blinks at him, slow and thoughtful. Clint’s thinking about that movie all over again, which is maybe why he doesn’t figure out the plan until his part in it is right in front of him.

                He’s up on the rooftops, and Robin’s gone, drawn away. Jason split from Batman and Coulson an hour earlier, and Clint’s been tracking the occasional comments over the comms – _Red Hood, status report_ , and _Red Hood, location_ and _Christ, can’t a guy piss in peace?_ – but hasn’t thought much about it.

                He figured Jason just needed a break, and Tony’s uncharacteristic quiet had made him suspect the two of them had snuck off together. He realizes, when the redhead they’re chasing appears at the end of the street, that Jason’s set this up.

                It makes sense. Bucky and Nightwing are half a city away, and Jason must be nearby, because the strange police chatter that had drawn Robin away – _That’s a Joker signal. Not an emergency. I’ll check on it._ – sounds exactly like the sort of thing Jason would set up and laugh about later.

                The woman is scanning the rooftops. Clint can tell the moment she spots him, because she goes still for half a second and then lowers her eyes and walks into the middle of the street.

                “Widow spotted.” Clint says, into the comms. He has his rifle on him, but he hasn’t used it all night. It takes him less than a second to level it her direction, double-check the scope, but less than a second, for her, should be more than enough time to get to cover.

                “Shit.” Jason says. “What?”

                Clint’s worked with Jason for two years now. He knows what it sounds like, when he’s faking surprise. He doesn’t know what it means, that Jason’s genuinely surprised by this. For a second, nothing makes sense.

                “Take the shot.” Jason says.

                “On my way.” Robin says. “Sixty seconds out.”

                In sixty seconds, this woman will be dead from a headshot, or she’ll have disappeared all over again.

                She raises her eyes. Through the scope, Clint can see that they are green, and she’s got that same kind of hollow look that Bucky gets, sometimes, when they’re two weeks into a mission and he’s forgotten to sleep.

                She looks tired, he thinks. And years younger than they’d been told to expect.

                She looks like she’s waiting for a bullet.

                “She set this up.” Clint says. He’d thought it was Jason’s plan. He thinks he was _meant_ to think it was Jason’s plan. “Coulson,” he says, seeking guidance.

                “Don’t take the shot.” Batman says.

                “Fuck off,” Clint says, immediately. “Coulson.”

                “We do not have capture orders,” Coulson says.

                “Forty-five seconds out.” Robin says, and it’s the first time Clint’s heard any emotion in his voice that isn’t annoyance and amusement.

                Fifteen seconds is too long for someone like her to stand, in the open, waiting. Five seconds is a mistake. Fifteen seconds is suicide.

                Clint doesn’t like to think about what he did, who he was, before SHIELD found him. Before Phil found him. But he remembers.

                He lowers his gun. “Can’t make the shot.” He says. It feels like failure, but not like a mistake.

                “Acknowledged,” Coulson says. “Red Hood? Are you in the area?”

                “Close enough.” Jason says. “Hawkeye, which direction is she headed?”

                Clint looks down at her, and she looks up at him, and he’s not looking through the scope anymore, so he can’t see the details of her facial expression, but he doesn’t think he likes what he sees. She turns, suddenly, and starts sprinting off into the night, and Clint wonders who the hell holds still for a bullet but runs from anything else.

                He doesn’t wonder about it for long. Doesn’t seem like that line of thinking would lead anywhere productive.

                “Northwest,” he says. “She’s running.”

                “On it.” Jason says.

                “Red Hood,” Batman says, “I didn’t bring you here to kill.”

                “Then fucking stop me, old man,” Jason says.

                There’s a stutter on the comms. “Locked out the Bats,” Tony says. “Hold on, I’m tracking her through traffic cameras. Oracle’s doing the same thing, though, so maybe put a rush on it.”

                Clint realizes that if he’d just taken the shot, everything would’ve ended. Not well. Sure as hell not amicably. But by letting her go, he’s pitched SHIELD against Batman and his allies.

                He thinks Robin’s probably not going to want to see that movie after all.

 

 

 

                She’s smaller than Jason expects her to be. And she falls faster than he thought she would, when he drops from the second story fire escape and lands on her back.

                There’s a fight, but not much of one. He’s got her pinned in thirty seconds, disarmed and barely struggling, and she’s landed a shallow cut to his ribs that sliced through the body armor but barely nicked his skin.

                He figures this is probably why Clint didn’t kill her. He’s a good kid. Sturdy, steady. Means well. But he’s more immovable object than unstoppable force. Without something to lean into, some kind of anger or fight, Clint tends to fall flat on his face.

                “You shot Robin,” Jason tells her. She’s done worse things. He’s read about them. He _was_ one of them.  But that’s the one that keeps sticking in his head, for some reason.

                She spits in his face, and Jason headbutts her, but he breaks her nose when he could’ve cracked her skull or smashed the delicate bone around her eye, and so he thinks maybe this is going to be a problem for him, too.

                She’s young. It’s not a thing that normally registers for him. It _wouldn’t_ have, a couple years back. But now he’s got Bucky in his head, _You know why it’s a bad idea to send kids to war?_

                She’s strong, and she’s trained, and Jason thinks he could kill her anyway, but it shouldn’t be as bloodless as this. If she were fighting back, it would hurt. He’d have to get stitched up, after. She’s letting him do this.

                “You know,” he says, “there are easier ways to get yourself killed.”

                She _does_ fight him then, but she fights to hurt instead of incapacitate. She’s trying to piss him off. Jason knows what that’s like, because he’d done it to Bruce for half a year.

                She’s good. She’s impressively, alarmingly good. She’s better than Tim. She’s better than Jason was, when he was her age, which means she started training younger than Jason and Tim did.

                Jason’s not sure he’s better than her, but he _is_ sure he wants to win more than she does.

                When they stop, he’s got her shoved against a grimy brick wall, gun lodged up under her jaw, aimed to blow her brains and half her skull into the wall behind her.

                “Ask me,” he says, because it’s _polite_. Because it’s basic decency. Because it’s the least she could fucking do, if she’s going to make him carry memories of her around for the rest of his fucking life, wondering if he made the right call. “Ask me to kill you,” he says, “and I’ll do it.”

                Because that’s the least _he_ could do. Because he knows what it’s like. Because there are times he would’ve asked, maybe, if there’d been anyone around to ask. If all that rage had ever been aimed any direction other than out.

                There’s blood on her face, dripping from her nose down to her mouth, and he knows he broke at least two ribs, maybe one of her collarbones, but she holds herself perfectly still. Seems like the pain doesn’t even register, which makes Jason feel sick about the whole thing.

                She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t fight. She waits.

                “Yeah,” Jason says, “can’t make decisions for yourself, huh? I used to know a guy like that.”

                Bucky got better. But Bucky’s a special case. Jason knows that with most people, if you give them a chance, you’ll come to regret it. Mercy means a lot to Bruce, but Jason’s always leaned toward justice. Justice can be brutal and bleak and bloody, but, once it’s done, it’s done. Justice, unlike mercy, almost never comes back to fuck you over worse than it did the first time.

                She swallows. With her head tipped back, gun shoved into the soft skin behind her jaw, he figures most of the blood from her nose is draining down her throat. It doesn’t seem to bother her much.

                Right then, Jason’s not sure who she reminds him of more, Bucky or Bruce.

                “Easiest way,” she tells him, “is to pull that trigger.”

                “That’s not asking.” Jason says. “And that’s true for the whole fucking species, so you’ll have to try a little harder.”

                “Red Hood.” Batman’s unwelcome but not entirely unexpected. He’s standing at the front of the alley, caging both of them in.

                Jason’s hand tightens on the gun. There’s a part of him that wants to shoot her, just so Bruce has to watch him do it.

                “The best way this ends,” she tells him, “is pulling the trigger.”

                “Maybe,” Jason says. _Probably_ , he thinks. He lowers the gun anyway.

                She looks at him like he’s managed to hurt her more by refusing to shoot her than he did by smashing his helmet into her face.

                He figures that’s probably true, too.

                He slams the butt of his gun into the side of her head, fast and precise, and he catches her when she collapses. She’s lighter than he wants to think about.

                “I ditched my comm.” He tells Bruce. “Tell Coulson to come pick us up.”

 

 

 

                The room in Wayne Manor is nicer than the room in SHIELD’s Gotham hospital, so Jason sneaks Bucky back to Bruce’s place. He figures Bruce owes him, and, anyway, if Bruce didn’t want Bucky there, he wouldn’t have let them in.

                Coulson and Clint are at the hospital, keeping an eye on the girl, and Bucky’s been cagey and _weird_ since he rounded the corner to find Jason and Batman and a girl who was knocked out but not dead.

                “Hey,” Jason says, as he kicks the door shut and sees Tony, sitting up in bed. “Bucky’s freaking out.”

                “Yeah?” Tony says, eyes darting between the two of them. “Bucky’s freaking out because you didn’t shoot someone?”

                “Are _you_ freaking out?” Jason asks, trying to make sense of the look on Tony’s face.

                “I watched her take you away from us.” Tony says. His shoulders are tight, even though the bottle of ludicrously expensive whiskey on the nightstand is at least a quarter empty. “I watched her put you in the back of that ambulance. I don’t—of the three of us, I never thought _I’d_ be the one who thinks we should’ve killed someone we didn’t.”

                “Coulson’s trying to find birth records. Doesn’t know which country to check first, but, you know. He’s Coulson. He’ll find them.” Jason starts ditching body armor and weapons. It gives him something to do that isn’t looking at either one of them. “I figure, if we’re lucky, she’s just an underfed eighteen.”

                “So she’s young.” Tony says. “That’s not why you didn’t do it.”

                “No,” Jason says. “It’s not.”

                Even now, he’s not entirely sure why he didn’t. He’s done worse things to better people.

                But maybe he didn’t want to shoot someone who reminded him so much of Bucky. Or maybe he didn’t want to shoot someone who reminded him so much of himself.

                “I recognized her.” Bucky says. He’s still standing just inside the door, fully suited up, like he thinks they’re going to go out again, even though dawn broke something like two hours ago. “I always knew who she was. _What_ she was. But there’s a lot in my head that I didn’t put there, so I didn’t realize until I saw her.” He pauses, takes a breath, like whatever he’s about to say is something he has to brace himself for. “I trained her.”

                “Huh,” Jason says. “Yeah, thought I recognized how she moved.”

                “The Winter Soldier trained her?” Tony asks. He’s always been more aggressive about that difference than either one of them.

                “Not fully.” Bucky says. “When I met her, they’d already been training her for years.”

                Jason does some quick math in his head, but runs pretty quickly right into a wall of _I don’t want to think about that shit_.

                “Think she can be fixed?” Jason asks.

                Bucky laughs. It’s not a nice laugh. It sets Jason on edge, and Tony visibly flinches and then goes for the whiskey.

                “I think she can be useful.” Bucky says. “I think, if she’s still capable of being loyal to anyone, we can make her loyal to us.”

                “How’s that?” Jason asks, peeling his shirt off and throwing it at Tony’s head, just to break that focused, miserable look on his face.

                “Same way you got me,” Bucky says, with a helpless shrug that Jason doesn’t like at all.

                Tony holds the bottle out to Bucky, who takes it, and Jason likes that a little better. Bucky doesn’t drink when he thinks there’s a chance it’ll go poorly if he does. If he’s drinking at all, he’s not as close to losing it as he seems.

                “I’m not sleeping with her.” Jason says. “She’s tiny. And mean.”

                Bucky rolls his eyes and tips the bottle back, takes a fortifying swallow before he climbs into bed and lets Tony start removing his weapons. “That’s not how you got me.”

                Jason knows that.

                He just thinks it’s endlessly, unforgivably shitty that they got Bucky Barnes for the bargain price of treating him like a human being.

                He sighs and kicks his shoes off, crawls in beside the two of them and takes the whiskey. “The worst part of this whole thing,” he says, “is that Batman’s gonna think I’m going soft. He’s gonna think he _won_.”

                Bucky makes a sympathetic face, but Tony shrugs, grabbing the bottle back. “Thought you might be worried about that.” He says. “Before Oracle threw me out of her system, I found a few candidates. Murderers, traffickers. The ones you like.”

                Jason blinks at him and then takes the bottle out of his hand and sets it carefully on the bedside table before hauling Tony into his lap. “I love you,” he says, earnestly. “You’re my _favorite_.”

                “And Bucky,” Tony adds, as he settles.

                “Yeah,” Jason agrees. “And Bucky.”

 

 

 

                Phil knew, when Batman called, that this mission was going to be complicated. He’d been prepared for a stack of paperwork as tall as his fist. But now that he’s got the Black Widow sitting docile and quiet on a hospital bed, knees curled to her chest, he’s starting to realize the paperwork will stack approximately to his waist.

                Clint’s stationed himself in the chair next to her bed, and the sidelong looks he keeps leveling at the nurses suggest it’s going to be problematic if Phil has to order her put down.

                He should be angry at Clint and Jason. He hadn’t technically ordered them to kill her, but they knew the mission objectives.  He can’t take agents into the field if he can’t rely on them to do their jobs.

                But when she’d first woken up, she’d panicked. It had been an odd thing to witness, because she was quiet with it, silent and stoic, and it was just the alarmed beeping of the heart monitor that gave her away.

                She’d said something in Russian, and Phil hadn’t understood, but everything that happened in the room was recorded, so he’d sent the audio to Barnes.

                “Hm.” There’d been a pause, and Phil had known immediately that Bucky wasn’t going to tell him what she said. He’d opted not to take that personally. “The place that trained her,” Bucky said, after a beat. “I remember. They’d chain the girls up at night.”

                “Ah.” Phil said.

                “There were tests, sometimes.” Bucky said. “Failure wasn’t well-received. Waking up, no mission, no handcuffs. That would be a bad morning.”

                In recent years, Phil has made a series of gambles. He bet on Clint, Bucky, Jason, and Tony. And there were any number of people at SHIELD who thought he was crazy for that, but Phil had calculated the odds carefully.

                He’s not sure what to make of this girl. If the others were not involved, he’s not sure he would have chosen to keep her alive. But he’ll have to do what he can, for her sake and for Barton and Barnes.

                He’s watching through the observation window when Batman appears, unannounced, beside him.

                “Security know you’re here?” Phil asks, just to be contrary. He’d almost spilled his coffee on himself when Batman materialized within feet of him, and he’s never liked surprises. Granted, for the past two years or so, he hasn’t liked Batman much, either.

                “We’ll take her.” Batman says. “I know people who can help her.”

                “No,” Phil says. “I’ve seen you try to help people. I have a better track record. I’ll keep her.”

                There’s not much Phil could do to stop him, if Batman decided to press the issue. Phil could shoot him, maybe. Or let Clint shoot him. But he doesn’t want a power vacuum in Gotham. If Batman decides to take her, Phil will let him.

                He might even appreciate being liberated from all the problems she represents. But he doesn’t believe for a second that letting Batman take this girl would work out better for her in the end.

                Batman doesn’t say anything. Phil’s starting to realize that Batman never loses an argument; he just stops having one.

In the hospital room, Clint carefully folds the mission report he’s supposed to be writing into a paper bird and sets it on the sheets at the end of the Widow’s bed.

                “You lied to Red Hood.” Batman says.

                “About what?” Phil asks, although he knows what he’s referring to. Of course he knows.

                “When Robin went missing, you told him I called to ask for his help.” Batman says. “I called to ask if he was responsible.”

                _Are you requesting SHIELD assistance?_

_No. I need you to tell me if Red Hood’s behind this._

                Phil sighs. He’d hung up after Batman asked him that. He thinks it’s maybe the only time in the past decade that someone’s ended a conversation before Batman was ready for it.

                “You might consider professional counseling.” Phil tells him. “You have very deep and unresolved trust issues.”

                “He’s capable of it.” Batman says. “There are very few people who have both the skills and the motive to kidnap Robin. Red Hood is on that list. It was reasonable to ask.”

                “The hell it was,” Phil says. He takes a moment to collect himself. “I told Jason you asked for his help, because it was the kinder thing to do. And because, if I’d told him what you’d accused him of, he never would’ve helped find Robin.”

                “You manipulated him.” Batman says.

                “ _Professional_ counseling.” Phil repeats. “If you think that kindness is inherently manipulative--”

                “You lied to him.” Batman says. “You lied to him, and you manipulated him, and it worked.”

                “Do you think I’m a threat?” Phil asks, turning to face him.

                Batman regards him for a long moment. “Red Hood is dangerous. Barnes is dangerous. Hawkeye, and the Black Widow are dangerous. At least three of them will do anything you tell them to, and I imagine the fourth will fall in line soon enough.”

                “We’re dangerous people.” Phil acknowledges. “But I’m asking if you think we’re a _threat_.”

                “You know who I am.” Batman says. “You know who I am, and Red Hood knows who the others are.”

                Phil blinks at him. He considers getting angry, but he can’t see how there’s anything to be gained from it. “I don’t know who you are.” He says, instead.

                “You expect me to believe,” Batman says, “that you don’t know who I am under this mask?”

                Phil raises his eyebrows. He could play this any number of ways, but, at the moment, he’s too tired to lie about it. “Jason asked me not to look into it.” He says. “So, no, I don’t know who you are.”

                Batman’s mouth opens and then closes. Surprise is an interesting look on him, but not an especially flattering one. “Tony Stark knows.”

                “I know he does.” Phil says. “Tony knows, Jason knows. I imagine Bucky knows, although he’s happy to pretend he doesn’t. And they’d tell me, if I asked. But Jason asked me not to look into it. So if, at any point, I need to know, I’ll ask him. Or you.”

                Batman stares at him, and says nothing.

                “ _Trust_.” Phil tells him, finally, absolutely exasperated. “Mutual trust. My team risks their lives on my orders every time we go out on a mission. I trust them. If they ask me for something, I’ll give it. You should trust your team. They trust you.”

                Phil stops short of telling Batman that he should _earn_ that trust. But only because he doesn’t want to write _And then I attempted to instigate a fist fight with Batman_ in his mission report later. Nick would likely frame it and post it somewhere embarrassing, and Phil doesn’t want to deal with the office gossip.

                “He didn’t kill her.” Batman says, and Phil is reminded, yet again, that he never loses arguments. Phil turns to face the window, and he’s surprised to find the paper bird is resting in the Widow’s carefully cupped hand. “I expected him to.”

                “You expect the worst out of everyone you know.” Phil says. He understands the inclination. Part of him does the same thing. The difference between the two of them is that Phil learned to use it as a skill instead of embracing it as a philosophy. “And you haven’t known Jason for years.”

                “I never really knew him.” Batman says. It’s quiet. Phil gets the odd idea that he didn’t mean to say it out loud.

                “You should.” Phil says. “Get to know him. He’s a good man.”

                No matter how strongly he’d object to the idea, Phil privately thinks Jason’s still more boy than man. But Phil can’t think of him like that. Not with Batman standing well within punching distance.

                “You matter to him.” Phil says, when Batman doesn’t reply. “He cares what you think. He misses Nightwing. He worries about Robin. I’ve got two agents without any family at all, but _he’s_ the lonely one.”

                Batman’s jaw tightens. He shifts his weight, and Phil keeps his eyes pinned on him, because he thinks, if he looks away for a second, he’ll just disappear.

                “It’s not hard.” Phil tells him. It _isn’t_. He’s seen people piece together family out of nothing, out of saved lives and shared hospital visits and twin shrapnel scars. “You tell him you’re proud of him, if you can get through it without accusing him of kidnapping and murder. You invite him home for birthdays. You don’t say his name like he’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

                “I _am_ proud of him.” Batman says. And Phil honestly _would_ punch him in the face, but, this time, he sounds like he means it.

                “It doesn’t do any good to tell me.” Phil says. “Tell _him_.”

                “He wouldn’t listen.”

                Maybe that’s true. It’s hard to make Jason listen, especially when he thinks he’s about to be hurt by something.

                “He listens to me.” Phil tries.

                “You earned it.” Batman says.

                Phil feels flattered, and a little sad. He decides, in the end, that he feels sorry for Batman.

                He doesn’t know where Bucky and Jason are right now. Or Tony, for that matter. But he’s not worried about it. He knows where they’ll be when he needs them.

                Batman knows where almost everyone is, at any given moment. But, even if he can guess where they’ll be when he needs them, it doesn’t seem like he can allow himself to believe in it.

                “If you need us again,” Phil says, “you can call us. You can ask for help.”

                Batman stares at him, and says nothing.

                Phil turns to face the window again. The Widow is pretending to be asleep, bird still cradled in her hand. Phil watches her, studying the careful curl of her fingers, until he knows Batman’s gone.  


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha, thought this fic was done, did you? Yeah, me too. 
> 
> But then I realized I wrote seven thousand words of Nat's appearance without a single sentence from her point of view. It's 2017, everyone, and we still don't have a Black Widow movie. I'm not trying to be part of the problem.
> 
> Please check the new tags before continuing. And if you notice I missed one, let me know. Still figuring out the tags.

                She chooses the youngest one. It’s not _because_ he’s the youngest. She knows better than most that youth is no guarantee of mercy.

                It’s a simple process of elimination.

                She’s had the Winter Soldier’s hands on her before. She doesn’t want to risk the memories overriding her awareness of the moment. She doesn’t want to die thinking about that time. She doesn’t want to die thinking about anything at all.

                The Red Hood is a suitable option. He’s the contingency plan. She can certainly rely on him to accomplish the task she needs, but she’s seen how he does things, how that anger works him into something flashy and overenthusiastic. She has been a spectacle before, and it has served her needs, but she doesn’t want it this time. She likes things neat and efficient and lined up, edges meeting edges, no overlap or overkill. That’s not how the Red Hood works. And this is a gift she’s giving herself, the last gift, so she sees no reason not to be self-indulgent.

                The oldest one, the keeper, the buttoned-down man who runs the team, is an unknown variable. She thinks, if he found himself amenable to her task, he would do it quick and clean, no unnecessary hysterics or hesitation. But he has declined to complete similar tasks before. His entire team consists of people that more reasonable men would have killed. She doesn’t know what it is in him that compels him to tinker with damaged goods, but she doesn’t trust it.

                She has been tinkered with enough. She is tired of it.

                She considers a few locations. There are places that possess a certain poetry, Volgograd or Kiev. She could arrange it in Moscow or São Paulo, bleed out where she committed the worst of her sins. But she knows, while one mess can distract from another, blood never leaves anything cleaner.

                She goes to a place where a death like hers won’t even make the news. In Gotham, a dead girl in the streets will be forgotten by sunrise.

                She goes into the city without hiding, lets Batman become aware of her presence, waits while he brings in the SHIELD team. She observes them for a night, studies the way they move, and then she sets a trap that separates Hawkeye from the troublingly pacifying presence of Robin.

                She walks into the street, and she waits.

                She doesn’t think about anything. At first.

                There is some kind of hesitation. She waits longer, but, now, she’s thinking.

                _It won’t hurt_ , she tells herself. It won’t. Hawkeye is very good at what he does, and he is not cruel about it. The bullet will punch through her skull and brain before the nerves have time to process the pain. It will be over before her brain has time to realize it’s begun.

                _It won’t hurt_ , she tells herself, again. It won’t. But it’s not the pain of it that scares her.

                She acknowledges that she does not want to die. She also acknowledges that it is better than the alternative.

                She waits thirty seconds before she admits to herself that Hawkeye is not going to take the shot.

                _Contingency plan_ , she thinks.

                Hawkeye is a sniper. He waits for his kills. Red Hood tends to prefer a more active approach.

                She starts running.

 

 

 

                With Hawkeye, it would have been quick and clean, virtually painless. With the Red Hood, it’s none of those things. That’s fine. In the end, an inelegant solution has just as much value as an elegant one, provided that the problem is addressed.

                She’s studied how he moves. She is, in theory, prepared for it. In practice, he’s nearly overwhelming.

                He’s agile and quick, almost acrobatic in his movements, and he hits _hard_. He was trained when he was much smaller; she recognizes the signs. He fights like someone who learned to target vulnerable points to compensate for a relative lack of physical strength. It’s the same way she fights.

                It’s mean, and brutal. Rules of engagement are for people who have never been desperate.

                She’s almost glad Hawkeye didn’t take the shot. She hasn’t been allowed a fight like this in over a year. She regrets, a little, that she can’t risk fighting to her full potential, because, if she incapacitates or eliminates Red Hood, whatever follows will be neither quick nor clean, and certainly won’t be painless.

                She needs him _angry_ , though.

                She should have shot Hawkeye before she fled. Not fatally, as that would drag the focus away from her. But, for people like Red Hood, a bullet in an ally can be very motivating. 

                “You know,” he says to her, “there are easier ways to get yourself killed.”

                Suicide is a simple thing. It is a target with no complications, no protections or traps or questions.

                The complicating factor is that Natasha has never chosen her own kills. The people she’s killed were all selected by others. It is, in the end, the slightest of paper shields, but she would like to leave this life with the scraps of innocence she has left.

                She fights him harder, hoping to distract him, anger him, make him decide that it is easier to kill her than stop her, but he pins her against a wall and puts a gun under her chin, and he does not pull the trigger.

                “Ask me,” he says. “Ask me to kill you, and I’ll do it.”

                Natasha never asked for any of this. She never _chose_ any of this.                                           

                “Yeah,” he says, and something strange crosses his face. Something like regret, or guilt, or sympathy. “Can’t make decisions for yourself, huh? I used to know a guy like that.”

                The Winter Soldier had even fewer choices than she did. She doesn’t know how he came to be what he is now, but she doesn’t begrudge him his good fortune. If that’s what it is.

                “Easiest way,” she says, “is to pull that trigger.”

                “That’s not asking.” He says. “And that’s true for the whole fucking species, so you’ll have to try a little harder.”

                It _is_ easy. She knows exactly how easy it is. It’s easy, and simple. It stops every chain of variables, nullifies every threat she represents. It’s a death that harms no one. There’s no one in the world who will miss her. And that part, at least, is not true for the whole species.

                “Red Hood.” Batman appears at the end of the alley. She is out of time.

                “The best way this ends,” she tells him, ignoring Batman and hoping it’ll convince him to do the same, “is pulling the trigger.”

                Honesty is a desperation play, and desperation has never worked for her.

                “Maybe,” he says, and she knows she’s lost. He lowers the gun and considers her for a second.

                She abandons the plan. She has no further contingency plans.

                She sees him changing his grip on the gun; she knows what he’s about to do. She lets him.

                Then gun slams into the side of her head. It’s slower and gentler than a bullet, which complicates matters considerably.

 

 

 

                She wakes up concussed. Paired with the drugs in her system, it regresses her considerably. She comes up confused, wearing a hospital gown, bathed in the unnatural glow of fluorescents.

                She hears the doctors speaking over her. They’re speaking English, but her mind layers Russian over them. She hears different doctors.

                She hears her thoughts from years ago, echoing in the voice of a version of herself still young enough to sound scared in her own head. _It’s just an experiment. It’s just a test. It’ll be over soon. It isn’t real. It isn’t real. It’s just medicine. Breathe, breathe, you can breathe, you can breathe_. _You’ll be able to move soon. Breathe_.

                The drugs make her mouth move slow, but not slow enough. She mumbles an embarrassment in Russian, and no one in the room speaks Russian, but she’s not stupid enough to think that’ll stop them from deciphering it eventually.

                There are cameras watching from every corner of the room.

                “You’re okay,” Hawkeye says, from her bedside. This close, he looks much younger than she’d realized. “Hey,” he says, using a tone better suited to pacifying frightened dogs. “You’re alright.”

                She takes a breath and resettles the sheets. She is not restrained, and the drugs are distracting, but not incapacitating. She’s not sure how to read this situation.

                “Surely,” she says, “even a terrible sniper could manage from this range.”

                “Whoops,” he says, with a shrug. He is, bizarrely, _smiling_ at her. “Forgot my bow back home. I hate working with guns, you know? They’re an insult to my craftsmanship.”

                “Hawkeye.” The keeper steps into the room, and Hawkeye looks at him expectantly but doesn’t tense up. That’s interesting. “Get yourself something to eat.”

                “Nah, that one nurse has been plying me with Jell-O.” Hawkeye says. “Not really hungry.”

                “Hawkeye,” the man repeats and gestures over his shoulder. “Leave the room for ten minutes so I can talk to the Black Widow alone.”

                “Oh,” Hawkeye says, “shit.” He smiles at Natasha again, and there’s an apology on his face, but no threat she can see. “That was the fastest he’s gone from subtle to fuck-you since Jason punched the Sokovian diplomat last year.”

                “Hawkeye,” the man says, again. He rubs at his face, and Hawkeye responds immediately to that display of vulnerability. He slides out of his chair and walks across the room, squeezes the man’s shoulder as he passes him.

                “Don’t worry,” Hawkeye says, encouragingly. “If they have any Pop Tarts, I’ll bring you, like, six.”

                “I’d prefer a quick death,” the man calls after him.

                “What’s that?” Hawkeye says, as he shoulders his way through the door. “Sixteen s’mores Pop Tarts? You got it.”

                The man sighs and shakes his head. After a moment, he grabs the chart at the end of her bed and settles into the newly emptied chair beside her to review it.

                Very slowly, Natasha curls her legs under her. She fusses with the sheets, using it to distract from the movement of her legs and to test her manual dexterity. If she needs to, she’s pretty sure she can break this man’s neck.

                “How are you feeling?” The man asks, suddenly. He flips to the next page and glances up at her, looking directly at her eyes for a second before looking back to his records. “The doctors believe you might have a concussion. And a pair of broken ribs.”

                She does, but that’s not worth worrying over and certainly not something she’ll be admitting to. “I feel sedated,” she says, instead.

                “You are.” He says, with a shrug, “For everyone’s safety.”

                She looks down at herself and then up at him again, keeps her chin tipped low and her arms held against her sides. _Look small, lure in_. “You think I’m dangerous?”

                He snorts, politely, and raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t bother to look away from her chart. Instead, he takes a pen from his pocket and starts writing a note in the margins, and it sticks in her head, the idea that this man has the authority to issue orders to doctors.

                “I think,” he says, dropping the chart into his lap and looking up at her, “that you are incredibly dangerous.”

                “Someone attacked me,” she tells him, earnestly. “In an alley. He had a gun.”

                “Yes, and you had a knife. Which you did not use to the full extent of your ability.”

                “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Denial is gamble. It can make people angry, and she is not in a position to control the form that anger takes, when it manifests. But anger is something that can be used. She can’t do anything with the calm, reserved way he’s watching her now.

                “You don’t?” His flat tone of voice implies that he doesn’t believe her, and that he’s not particularly impressed by this tactic.

                “He attacked me. I didn’t know who he was, and I don’t know where I am. I want to call my parents.”

                He grimaces at that, and it hits so fast and is buried so quickly that it has to be reflexive. He stares at her for a moment and then sighs and tips his head to the side. “Do you have parents?” He asks. “Do you know their names?”

                She opens her mouth to list off one of the contacts she’s been given, but she knows, immediately, that it won’t do any good. She shrugs instead. “Why am I here? I want to go home.”

                “You’re here because two of my agents wanted you to be here. And I am not entirely convinced you have a home to go to.”

                “You have a gun under your jacket,” she tells him. She wasn’t sure, at first, but she’d seen it press against the fabric when he reached for her chart. “Seems like, if you don’t want me here, there’s an easy solution.”

                He shrugs and flips through her chart, makes another note at the very end. “I’m not in the habit of shooting unarmed teenage girls in hospital beds.”

                “What _are_ you in the habit of?”

                He’s quiet for a moment, and, when he looks up again, he’s looking through the observation window set into the wall, watching as the sniper approaches. “Finding a way to make people useful,” he says, mouth quirking up in a strange smile.

                “I’m always useful,” Natasha says, because she is. She’s the most useful person she knows. Everyone’s always finding some kind of use.

                “Hm,” the man says. “I should’ve been more clear. I specialize in finding ways to make people useful for long-term employment. In general, that means finding work that doesn’t actively destroy them.”

                She can’t think of a single productive thing to say to that.

                The door swings open, and Hawkeye slides through, looking grim. “Bad news,” he says, “I gotta quit SHIELD.”

                The minder weathers this with a single, lazy blink. “Did you get in fight with the kitchen staff?”

                “Nah,” he says, and then pauses for a second before shrugging. “Only a small one.” He holds a cup out in front of him like a peace offering. “Got them to put three espresso shots in this.”

                The man considers him for a long moment, and then he sighs and stands up. “I am appalled,” he says, as he takes the coffee, “by how transparent you are.”

                “ _I’m_ appalled by how sensitive those people are about their pantry. I’ve got clearance to shoot royalty, but I can’t be in a hospital cafeteria pantry?” Hawkeye says. “That’s bullshit.”

                The man tucks her chart back into its place at the end of her bed and then gives her a brief, considering look before he makes his way toward the door. “Nothing sharp,” he says, over his shoulder. “Nothing classified.”

                “Got it,” Hawkeye says, with a lazy salute. He settles back into the chair and watches as his handler leaves the room. He waits a few seconds and then he reaches into his jacket and pulls out several packages of Pop Tarts. “You want strawberry or brown sugar? They didn’t have any of the good ones.”

                She blinks at him. He holds the packages up, shiny foil reflecting light into her eyes.

                “Which one?” He prompts her, again.

                “I’m not taking any food from you,” she says, after she realizes he won’t get there on his own. “I don’t know you.”

                “Yeah, but,” he shakes them at her. “Individually wrapped. Prepackaged. Safe as houses, c’mon.”

                She turns away from him and brings her knees up to her chest. “No.”

                “Yeah, alright.” He says, looking only slightly deflated. He drops one of the packages on her bedside table and opens the other. “You can have strawberry. I’m a gentleman.”

                She doesn’t understand what she’s doing here, or where they intend to send her next. The senior agent has the easy professionalism of someone who won’t give up any unintentional information, but this boyish sniper beside her, happily crunching into a brown sugar Pop Tart, seems like an infinitely easier mark.

                “When do I get to leave?” She asks him.

                “Uh.” There’s a brief pause where he just stares at her, motionless, and then he chews slowly for a handful of seconds before swallowing and shaking his head. “Sorry. Are we playing some weird game where you pretend you’ve got somewhere to go?”

                She blinks at him, letting her eyes widen and her mouth push flat. She barely has to try, and he’s already folding.

                “Okay,” he says, grimacing, “put that face away. I don’t deserve this. I tried to give you Pop Tarts.”

                “Why am I here?” She asks. “I want to leave.”

                “Yeah, let’s not do that.” He says. “Let’s extend each other some professional courtesy, okay?”

                “I want to go _home_.”

                “Oh, c’mon,” he says, and shoves half a brown sugar Pop Tart in his mouth and stares beseeching out the window, like he thinks his minder is going to come back and save him from this awkward moment.

                Natasha waits him out. She doesn’t have many other options. She has decent odds of disabling or killing him, but, so far, this has been a relatively painless experience. Attacking the sniper will not endear her to the others.

                “Look,” he says, finally. “You’re here because you’ve been killing people. Some of them maybe deserved it. And some of them really, really did not. You shot Robin. That was uncalled for. And you helped kidnap one of our people, and, sure, he’s kind of an asshole, but you don’t torture people. That’s just a general rule. You don’t.”

                She thinks this boy’s minder has been very careful with him. It was probably meant to be a kindness.

                “What’s your job?” She asks him. “Are you the police?”

                He rolls his eyes. “Just, like. A _hint_ of professional courtesy, even. Just a little.”

                “If you are not the police,” she says, “why are you detaining me?”

                “Yeah, fair. This isn’t our usual thing.” He shrugs, and his eyes go to the window again. “Well, I guess it’s kinda my boss’ thing. He recruited me right out of prison.”

                “You were in prison?” She tries to imagine it, looks for any of the mannerisms she would expect, but she sees none of them.

                He laughs and rubs at the back of his neck, mouth curling up in a slow, easy grin. “Yeah, for about four days. I think it would’ve been half that, but I was his first outside recruit. I guess he had to convince them to let him.”

                “Is that what this is?” She asks. “Recruitment?”

                “You say that like this was planned.” He kicks back in his chair, balancing easily on two legs, and shrugs at her. “Trust me, it was not. The plan was to kill you.”

                “Then why,” she says, again, “am I here?”

                He presses his lips together and frowns up at the ceiling. He looks, very briefly, at the cameras.

                “Here’s the thing,” he says. “I’m trash. Alright? I’m better now, but, when I was recruited, I was just this idiot kid who never finished middle school. I hurt people. And I guess I was kinda tricked into it. I guess it wasn’t entirely my fault, but I did it. I hurt people, and I got caught, and I didn’t have anyone. My boss could’ve left me there. Would’ve been the same as putting a bullet in me, just slower. But he didn’t.”

                She stares at him, and she sees ways to play him, ways to wrap him up in his own idealism and use it against him. But this is not a job. She has no orders. She leans back against the hospital pillows, and she doesn’t say anything.

                “You don’t have to choose us.” He’s not looking at her. He has the chair balanced on a single leg, and she marks the tell. It is somehow reassuring to see that he at least has the self-preservation instincts required to try to distract someone when he’s making himself vulnerable. “Hell, I’m not even sure what his plans are. But you’ll get a choice.”

                His chair clatters down onto four legs, and she flinches, looks up at him, and finds that he’s looking directly back at her. “Trust me,” he says, that smile back in place, “we’re the best one.”

 

 

 

                Hawkeye is not insufferable company. He keeps trying to pass her Pop Tarts, and he has offered to teach her how to juggle three times, but he’s calm and steady and his presence seems to encourage the nurses and doctors to finish their work quickly.

                “You hate doctors?” Hawkeye asks her, once, when the most recent medical professional has left the room. “I hate doctors.”

                She shrugs, and he laughs.

                “Bullshit,” he says, with an easy grin. “I can tell. You hate them too.”

                She does. She hates them, and she hates hospitals, and she wants _out_ of here. But she hasn’t given any indication of that, and she isn’t going to validate Hawkeye’s ridiculous theories.

                “Why do they call you Hawkeye?” She asks. “Clearly, your aim is terrible. Do you have a thing for birds?”

                “Yeah, that’s definitely it.” He says, with a nod and another unfazed, friendly smile. “I’m not actually a sniper at all. I’m SHIELD’s bird keeper. I look after the homing pigeons, and the director’s parakeets.”

                She blinks at him. “It’s nice that they found something to keep you occupied.”

                His smile broadens into a grin. “You’re mean under all that robot, huh?”

                He says it like it’s _funny_. Under the robot, there’s nothing. There’s just more robot.

                “Oh, look,” Hawkeye says, “turf battle.”

                She blinks at him, confused, and then follows his quick, pointed look at the observation window.

                Batman is standing in the hallway, staring at her. The agent is beside him, where he’s been for the past half hour or so, drinking yet another cup of coffee and watching the two of them.

                “Don’t worry.” Hawkeye says, encouragingly. “He’ll chase him off.”

                “And if he doesn’t?” She wonders what either one of these SHIELD agents is supposed to do if Batman decides to get oppositional about their claim to her.

                “I’ll shoot him.” Hawkeye says, with a shrug. “In the leg.” He pauses, head tipped back, and something interesting crosses over his face. “Maybe both legs.”

                “You’re mean under all those smiles, huh?” She says, quietly.

                He frowns like he’s going to object and then, after a moment, he shrugs again. He grabs the paperwork he’s supposed to be filling out and starts folding it up, instead. His hands are neat and precise, and she watches him, curious.

                “You know how you shot Robin?” He says, creasing a fold with the edge of his hand. “And kidnapped Red?”

                She remembers doing both of those things. Hydra is not her preferred employer, but she hadn’t had much say in the matter. The mission had been delivered to her, and she had completed it. She heard the Hydra facility was raided shortly thereafter. She heard that the target escaped, and that the men who’d arranged for her assistance were killed.

                She hadn’t been bothered by the work, or the outcome. She is a little bothered, now, to realize how much of her past these people have pieced together. She’s starting to realize that lying to them won’t be an especially productive tactic.

                “Maybe don’t do that again.” Hawkeye says. “You’re getting a chance. Okay? Don’t waste it.”

                He sets a paper bird down at the foot of her bed, and she stares at it, utterly confused by its existence. It’s such a strange, useless thing. She doesn’t understand what she’s meant to do with it.

                “When he met me,” Hawkeye says, jerking his chin toward the agent, “I was trash, remember? He gave me a chance. There was good in me, and he found it. I think he can find it in you.”

                She thinks he’s ridiculous. She thinks he’s a child.

                She thinks it’s a nice sentiment, but not the sort of thing that applies to people like her. She’s sure that it’s true for him and his small, innocent indiscretions, the artless, unintentional ways he hurt people when he was too young to know better. But there’s not a single part of her that hasn’t been corrupted by what she is, by the rotten, toxic heart of her.

                She turns away from him. She’s tired. She’s not accomplishing anything.

                Concussions and broken ribs require rest.

                She shifts around in the bed, arranging the sheets, and she palms the bird as she goes, brings it up so she can look at it.

                It’s just another one of his stupid tricks, like the juggling and the chair balancing. It’s nothing. It’s trash.

                She can’t remember the last time someone gave her anything useless. Pretty clothes, and sharp knives, and poisoned champagne. She doesn’t know if anyone’s ever given her something they made with their own hands, for no discernable reason and with no obvious purpose.

                _There was good in me, and he found it. I think he can find it in you,_ she thinks, and it’s laughable.

                The sniper is a child, and someone will need to look after him. She hopes his minder has some idea of his value.

 

 

 

                She doesn’t sleep. Of course she doesn’t. The interesting thing is that Hawkeye does.

                He falls asleep sitting up, feet stretched out in front of him and crossed neatly at the angles. There’s a smear of strawberry filling sticking to one side of his mouth. He breathes easy and deep, with the back of his skull cradled carefully into the headrest of the chair. It means he’ll wake up without the sore neck he’d get from keeping his chin tucked to his chest, but it leaves his throat bared.

                She’s not sure that she counts this is as trust. She has no knife, and the agent is watching through the observation window.

                _Calculated risk_ , she thinks. _Bait_.

                When the agent decides they need to move, he knocks on the door first. There’s a pattern to the knock, and Hawkeye’s awake in seconds, blinking and yawning. “Coulson?” He says, mumbling, still half-asleep, and then his eyes slide to Natasha, and he’s not asleep at all. “Shit.”

                “That’s alright.” The man – Coulson – says. “I’m sure she already knew my name.”

                She hadn’t. She looks between them and keeps her face carefully neutral.

                “It’s time to go.” Coulson says. “Hawkeye, the others should be here soon. See if we can borrow the plane.”

                “Got it.” Hawkeye says. He leaves quickly, and Natasha sits up a little so she can follow him with her eyes. He’s a child, and he needs a keeper, but he wakes quickly. At least there’s that.

                “I’m taking you to SHIELD,” Coulson says. He drops a bag on the bed, near her feet, and she curls her fingers protectively around the ridiculous paper bird before she realizes what she’s doing. His eyes got to her hand, but he has the grace not to say anything. “I found some clothes that might fit. I thought you might like an opportunity to change.”

                “Where are my clothes?” She asks.

                “They had blood on them.” Coulson says. He smiles a little at the look she gives him, but it’s not the sort of smile Hawkeye’s been so free with. He’s polite, but there’s no friendliness there. “And they were taken as evidence. We’re still trying to decipher who you work for.”

                “Whoever pays,” she says, with a shrug. It’s not the complete truth, but it’s a piece of it.

                She opens the bag and grabs the clothes, spills them out onto the sheets and tries to analyze what it means, what the options are meant to imply. What’s the difference between a woman’s button-down work shirt and a man’s boxy “I ♥ Gotham” sweater? What will Coulson think of her if she chooses one over the other?

                “SHIELD pays.” He says, thoughtfully. “Not as much as some of your previous employers, I’m afraid. But we do have our benefits. We won’t ask you to kill children. Or civilians.”

                “You think that bothers me?”

                “I think if it didn’t bother you, you wouldn’t be here.”

                She frowns at him and then grabs the hospital gown and pulls it up and off of her, drops it onto the sheets. As a way to end the conversation, it succeeds remarkably well. Coulson swivels away immediately, turning to stare at the wall.

                “Some warning,” he says, “would be appreciated. In the future.”

                She rolls her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says, without bothering to make it sound like she means it. “Did I scandalize you?”

                “Yes, actually,” he says. “Which I’m sure was your intent. Going forward, if we find ourselves pursuing a line of discussion you find particularly uncomfortable, I’d like to request that you attempt to verbally redirect, instead of trying to break even by making _me_ uncomfortable.”

                “Maybe I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable.” She says, as she tugs on the Gotham sweatshirt and then maneuvers herself into a pair of men’s jeans that are at least two sizes too big everywhere except the hips. “Maybe I think you’re cute.”

                “And now,” he says, taking a bracing sip of his coffee, “I am incredibly uncomfortable. Congratulations.”

                She searches through the bag for a belt, but finds nothing. No belts, and no shoelaces. She begrudgingly consents to the unremarkable black sandals she’s been given. “Only have eyes for blonde snipers? I don’t blame you. He seems sweet. Malleable.”

                “No, that was a misstep.” He turns to face her, and his expression has slipped back to bland. “I’ve heard that one too often. I’m afraid it’s not a weak spot anymore. And if you think Hawkeye’s malleable, you haven’t given him an order he doesn’t like yet.”

                “Fair enough.” She says. She tugs at the loose hem of the sweater, hooks her fingers in the belt loops of the pants. If she has to fight in this, she’s going to end up tangled up in her own clothing. She wonders if that was the point. “Guess I’ve got it backwards. He’s the one with eyes for you.”

                He blinks, and his hand tightens the slightest bit around his coffee. She grins at him, meaner than she should let show. He considers her, and she waits for it, interested to see what he’ll come up with, and then the door swings open and the Winter Soldier walks in, Red Hood at his heels.

                “Hey, boss,” Red Hood says, “we should probably get out of here kinda quick.”

                “Yes, I’d imagine,” Coulson says, turning to regard him with a look that borders on exasperation. “As you only seem to remember I’m in charge when there’s a mess to clean up.”

                “No idea what you’re talking about.” He says. He has two guns in shoulder holsters under his jacket and at least three knives that she can see. There’s a wet spot low on his right sleeve. It’s hard to see red on black, but she doubts it’s rain. “And, frankly,” he adds, “I’m offended by the insinuation.”

                “We killed a couple dealers.” The Winter Soldier says, without hesitation or apology. “They’ve been using kids to sell in the schools.”

                “Is _that_ what we were doing?” Red Hood says, feigning incredulity so poorly that she’s not even sure she’d classify it as phoning it in. “Sorry,” he says, turning to Coulson. “You know how I get confused about these outreach programs.”

                Coulson stares at them for a second and then tips his coffee back, drains the cup entirely, and tosses it into a trash can. “Do we have a plane?”

                The Winter Soldier nods. “We do.”

                “Does this plane have civilians on it?”

                “No.” The Winter Soldier shares a look with Red Hood. “Our civilian is taking commercial transport home.”

                “Unusually cooperative of him,” Coulson notes, with raised eyebrows.

                “We wanted to put some space between him and our cargo.” Red Hood looks to Natasha, and he smiles. She likes this smile better than Coulson or Hawkeye’s, because she’s familiar with this kind. She smiles her own threat back to him, and his smile blooms into a full grin.

                “You guys ready?” Hawkeye says, as he walks into the room. There are mysterious lumps under his jacket that do not match to the shapes of any weapon she can think of. She assumes he’s been raiding the pantry again. “Plane’s prepped. And Robin just said something weird over the comm. Did we kill people?”

                “Why are you still talking to Robin?” Red Hood says. “Don’t let him get in your head. He’ll ruin your whole life.”

                “Do you need help?” The Winter Soldier says, and Natasha tips her head in question when she realizes he’s talking to her. “Getting to the plane.” He clarifies. “We were told you might be injured.”

                “ _Might_ be.” Red Hood looks vaguely offended. “I broke at least a couple of the floating ribs on her right side.”

                “We’re all very impressed,” Hawkeye says, deadpan, “that you beat up a teenage girl.”

                “Hey,” Red Hood says, “you can box her next time, Jailbait. You’ve got dental, right? Maybe they’ll be able to staple a few of your teeth back into your mouth, after she’s done.”

                Coulson’s phone chirps insistently, and he checks the screen before leveling an impressively blank look at Red Hood. “How curious,” he says. “A phone call from Batman.”

                “Yeah, see, that’s where you went wrong.” Red Hood says. “You added him to your contacts. You should’ve blocked the number, thrown your phone into a ditch, and bought a new burner. Rookie mistake.”

                “Alright,” Coulson says, “everyone on the plane.” He treats Natasha to a quick sideways glance. “You’re fine?”

                “I’m fine.” She confirms. To prove it, she slides out of bed, throws the clothes and the hospital gown into her bag, and tucks the stupid, useless paper bird into the front pocket of her sweater before the Winter Soldier or Red Hood notice it. “Let’s go.”

 

 

 

                At SHIELD, they put her in a room that locks from the outside. “It’s not so bad,” Hawkeye says, eyes skating around the room from where he’s standing in the doorway. “Look, there’s a bed and everything. Definitely not a jail cell.”

                “Oh, yeah,” Red Hood says, from behind Hawkeye. “That whole all-internal walls, no-window look is a great one. Hey, if you ask real nice, I’ll smuggle in a rock hammer during the next visit. You can _Shawshank_ your way outta here in a couple decades, easy.”

                “How exactly,” she says, turning to face him, “would you like me to ‘ask real nice?’”

                “Oh, gross,” Red Hood says, immediately withdrawing and looking almost helplessly over his shoulder. “Someone help. I need a grownup.”

                “No one’s bringing you a rock hammer.” Coulson says. He steps up beside Hawkeye, and she thinks it’s odd, how neither one of them follow her into the room. “You’re here for the foreseeable future. If you’d like to request any specific items that could _not_ be used to escape, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.”

                “She needs a door that locks from the inside.” Hawkeye says, gesturing to the door. “Coulson, c’mon. I got a deadbolt when I had to stay in these.”

                “If you reflect on the details of your separate cases,” Coulson says, “I think you’ll come to appreciate why we’re not allowing her to lock herself in.”

                Hawkeye frowns at him and crosses his arms over his chest.

 _Seems sweet,_ she hears, in her own voice. _Malleable_.

                “Why can’t she stay with us?” Hawkeye asks, and Natasha does not allow her eyebrows to go up, but she gives Coulson an inquisitive look.

                “They’re not fucking.” Red Hood clarifies, helpfully. “And don’t ask them about it. They get real squirrelly.”

                “She hasn’t been cleared to leave this facility.” Coulson says, ignoring Red Hood entirely. “She’s staying here.”

                Hawkeye makes a face and then looks at her. “You gotta play nice for a while.” He tells her. “Check all the forms, go to the meetings. Let the vampires in medical drain you dry. But then they’ll let you out.”

                “I understand,” she says, with a nod. She understands better than he does. She knows what she is, and she knows what SHIELD is. And a door that locks from the inside would only delay the inevitable. If they decide she needs to be relocated or removed, a single locked door won’t stop them.

                “Coulson,” Hawkeye says, “I don’t think she understands.”

                “I think the mission is over,” Coulson says, “and we should all go home.”

                “What about her?” Hawkeye asks, jerking his chin toward Natasha.          

                “She’s staying here,” Coulson repeats.

                He’s remarkably patient with his team. Natasha would expect more disobedience from the others, given how lenient he is, but they seem to know where the lines are. Red Hood, the Winter Soldier, and Hawkeye are quite a collection. She wonders how he acquired them, and how he’s managed to train them.

                “I’m staying here.” Hawkeye says. He shrugs at the look Coulson gives him. “For tonight,” he says. “I’ve got a report to write anyway.”

                Natasha expects Coulson to put a stop to this. Allowing Hawkeye to continue investing time and emotion into her is a mistake. She’ll use it against all of them, if she needs to. Judging from the way Coulson’s brows pull together and the long look Red Hood and the Winter Soldier share, everyone in the hallway understands that, except for Hawkeye.

                “If you want,” Coulson says, which is baffling. “Don’t get into trouble.”

 

 

 

                Hawkeye brings her dinner and a set of hospital scrubs that he apparently stole from medical. “For pajamas,” he says, as he hands her the tray, split neatly between food and clothing. “I mean, might as well be comfortable.”

                She doesn’t mind the room. She’s been in worse. On some especially tiresome jobs, she’s paid to stay in worse.

                She’s already found the cameras and the mics. They weren’t especially well-hidden, and she doesn’t mind a breach of privacy that is so transparent with its intentions. She doesn’t mind being watched, but she finds being lied to is growing increasingly tedious.

                “Do you want to come in?” She asks, gesturing in welcome as she goes deeper into the room, to set the tray down on the desk she’s been given.

                The desk is bolted to the wall. Everything single piece of furniture is bolted to the wall. She has a bathroom with no towels and a shower with no shower curtain. She wonders if it would expedite things if she explained to SHIELD that she won’t hurt anyone unless she’s ordered to, and she is currently sufficiently isolated from anyone who’s qualified to give her orders.

                Probably not. And, anyway, it’s not even true. She’ll hurt anyone she has to, if it comes to it. She’s certainly proven that.

                “No,” Hawkeye says. He’s still standing in the hallway. He has his own tray propped against his hip, and he’s smiling at her. He looks a little sad, and that catches her attention, brings her back across the room with her soup held her to her chest.

                “It’s yours.” He says. “You don’t have to invite me in.”

                “I think you’re taking this a little seriously.” She raises her eyebrows at him, but he doesn’t seem dissuaded.

                “Boundaries are important.” He says, exactly like he’s parroting back someone else’s words.

                “Is that what Coulson told you?” She asks. “Was that before or after he moved you into his house?”

                “Okay,” Hawkeye says, frowning at her, “I think Red made it pretty clear earlier that that’s not a funny joke.”

                “I’m trying to figure out the dynamics of the team.” She tells him. “Red Hood and the Soldier are not subtle. Then there’s you and Coulson.”

                “People can just like each other.” Hawkeye tells her. That sad smile is back, and she finds that she regrets being the cause of it. “Friendship exists.”

                “He’s not fucking you?” Natasha asks. It’s interesting. She hadn’t made a call one way or the other on that, but her instincts had tilted more toward _yes_ than _no_.

                Hawkeye heaves an exaggerated sigh. “Christ,” he says, long-suffering.

                “Why not?” She asks. “He turned you down?”

                He gives her an exasperated look. “ _Friendship_ ,” he says, again. “It exists. It’s a thing that people do with each other that usually doesn’t involve taking off each other’s clothes.”

                “Is that what you’re after? Is that why you’re here?” Natasha asks, pointedly. “So we can be friends and not take off each other’s clothes?”

                He makes a face, and she thinks she’s effectively warned him off, but he rallies. Sets his shoulders and his chin, and carries on anyway. “I’m here because I made the call not to shoot you, and I really don’t want to be wrong about that.”

                He _was_ wrong. She doesn’t blame him for it. There was a time when she used to shy away from the bloodier practicalities, too. He’s a little old for it, but not everyone’s as precocious as she is.

                “You still feeling weird about food?” Hawkeye asks, nodding toward the soup she hasn’t tried yet. “We can switch, if that’ll make you feel better.”

                She gives him a brief, patient smile. His answering grin is more than she deserves. Clearly, no one’s taught him how to negotiate. “I’m unarmed, in a room that locks from the outside, in a building staffed by hundreds of armed SHIELD agents. If they drugged the soup, it’s the least of my problems.”

                “Okay,” he says, with a nod, “glad you feel that way. Because I actually already switched them.” He hefts his bowl and then takes a drink, right from the bowl, like some kind of farm animal. “So if they drugged it, put me in the recovery position.”

                “You’re insane.” She tells him, and then reconsiders. “Your understanding of the world is deeply flawed.”

                “Sure,” he says, and shrugs. “But no one’s drugging your soup on my watch.”

                She shakes her head and dips her spoon into the soup. She stirs, and then takes a careful sip. It’s reassuringly bland.

                “I’m closing the door now.” She tells him, but she doesn’t move. If he wants to be on her side of the door when it closes, she’s not sure she’d mind.

                “Great,” Hawkeye says. “Throw me a pillow first?”

                She blinks. “There are no pillowcases,” she warns, and climbs to her feet. She doesn’t have sheets, either, but the room is kept at a comfortable temperature, so she doesn’t see any reason to complain. She grabs one of the pillows and pitches it at him, without warning.

                He catches it easily and stares at the pillow, sighing in fake despair. “I remember these days,” he says. “Coulson’s pillows are much better.”

                “You don’t have to stay here.” She tells him. She thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous that he plans to camp out in the hallway all night, with a pillow, a bowl of soup, and his mission reports. “It won’t do any good for you to stay here. If they show up in the middle of the night, you’ll let them in.”

                A look crosses his face that she can’t quite read. There’s a stubborn set to his jaw, and a smile on his face that looks like something he borrowed from Red Hood.

                “Maybe,” he says, as he settles back against the wall opposite her door. “But I’ll do some yelling first. Give you a head’s up.”

                She doesn’t understand him. There’s a piece of him she’s missing, something that will explain why he’s so invested in her, why he’s willing to do even half the things he’s done.

                “Goodnight,” he says, when she’s been staring for too long and the silence has stretched.

                “Goodnight,” she says. She kicks the door shut.

                Two hours later, when she’s finished the soup and examined every inch of the room for any piece of it that’ll give, she hears the locks in the door click shut. A minute or so after that, she hears a rustling at her door, and she turns to watch as the quarter inch of space between the door and the floor goes black.

                She waits in the dark for a long time before she realizes that the idiot sniper has placed himself directly in front of her door.

                Without thinking too much about it, she grabs the remaining pillow and climbs off the bed. She sprawls out on the floor, a foot or so away from her door, and she stares up at the ceiling, wondering if she’ll sleep at all.

                _There was good in me, and he found it. I think he can find it in you._

                She should’ve gone to Moscow. She’s always had good luck in Moscow.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New tag! "Interrogation." Yikes. 
> 
> Nothing graphic, but if you're sensitive to it, I'd skip the last section. Or at least the bit between the paragraph that begins with "After breakfast, they take her to see her intel handlers" and the paragraph that begins with "Jason doesn’t take her to breakfast for twenty-three days after that."

                Tony sends them the pictures the next morning. The subject line of the email is a series of question marks.

                “So, probably not anything sexy, then,” Jason says, glancing at the computer as he walks by. “Damn. Well, tell me about it if it’s important.” He squeezes Bucky’s shoulder, flicks the back of his ear, and then goes to take a shower.

                When he comes back, towel tucked around his hips, Bucky’s toggling between the two pictures, frowning over his cup of coffee. “I think,” he says, thoughtfully, “we are a little fucked.”

                “How fucked?” Jason asks, swiping the coffee out of his hand. “On a scale from one to that time we didn’t tell Tony you’d been shot?”

                “Hm,” Bucky says, and mulls it over for a second. “I’d say this rates about that time we snuck Clint out of Coulson’s place and got him drunk for his birthday.”

                “Huh.” Jason says. “So, reasonably fucked.”

                “Yeah.” Bucky agrees, with a nod. “We are reasonably fucked.”

                In the first picture, Clint’s stretched out on the floor in a SHIELD hallway, back pressed to a door and head resting on a pillow that has no pillowcase. He’s sleeping on his side, bow in hand.

                In the next picture, the girl, the Widow, is stretched out on a very similar floor, back to a distressingly similar door, and she doesn’t have any weapons, but her hands are curled into fists.

                “They’re kinda cute,” Jason says, optimistically. “Maybe they’ll fall in love and make danger babies.”

                Bucky turns his head to stare up at Jason, and Jason shrugs. “Could happen,” he says. “Anyway, someone on the team’s gotta have kids, and, try as we might, somehow the three of us still aren’t getting knocked up.”

                Bucky rolls his eyes, but Jason can see the smile he’s trying to suppress tugging at the corners of his mouth. “The most interesting thing about the future,” Bucky says, as he takes his coffee cup out of Jason’s hands, “is how the educational standards have declined.”

                “Yeah, sure, Greatest Generation,” Jason says, rolling his eyes. He sets off toward the kitchen, seeking out his own coffee. “Tony can send us a naked picture from the other side of the world in five Goddamn minutes, and it’s the _educational standards_ that really blow your mind.”

 

 

 

                “You’ve got a problem with your team.” Fury’s sitting behind his desk, steepling his fingers together, and Phil doesn’t even know why he bothers with the intimidation routine with him. He’s known Nick for years.

                “There are no problems with my team.” Phil says. There _aren’t_. Barton is over-identifying with the Widow to the point that he hadn’t even come home last night, but that’s not a problem. That’s a potential solution.

                “Are you trying to recruit the Black Widow?” Fury waves a manila folder at him, and Phil barely suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. The only reason Fury even has that folder is because Phil gave it to him at the beginning of this meeting. Fury’s mental organizational skills are unparalleled. His file organizational skills are unparalleled as well, in the sense that they are an absolute, unmitigated horror. “Do we need to discuss the boundaries of your team?”

                “I wasn’t aware my team had boundaries.” Phil says. He weathers the look Fury gives him by recalling the SHIELD Christmas party of ’86. There’s no way Nick will get rid of him. He knows entirely too much about him.

                “Your team has a mission.” Fury says. “Which is to wipe Hydra out of SHIELD. Adding Hydra personnel to the team isn’t actually _removing_ them from SHIELD. Do you see how that’s actually running directly counter to your mission?”

                “It’s a net negative if they take out more than one agent each. Barnes handled that much in his first week.” Phil shrugs. “And the Widow was never officially Hydra. She was hired by them. Occasionally.”

                “She’s dangerous,” Fury says, bluntly, and Phil just blinks at him, because everyone he knows these days is dangerous. “To your team,” Fury clarifies. “I hear Barton spent the night camped outside her room.”

                “He did.” Phil’s not concerned about that. If Clint gets his heart broken, it won’t be the first time. People are constantly underestimating his team, and it is consistently useful, and consistently infuriating.

                “What’re you gonna do if she turns him?” Fury says, dropping the file onto his desk. “You gonna order Jason to put him down? Or were you thinking Barnes?”

                Privately, Phil thinks that it’d be easier to turn Nick Fury against SHIELD than to turn Clint Barton against his team, but he doesn’t see any benefit in casting aspersions on Fury’s character. And, anyway, the idea that Nick Fury is a slippery bastard is hardly revolutionary.

                “Well,” Phil says, with a polite smile, “I see your point. That would be a messy situation. So, I think I’ll just turn her, instead.”

                Fury scowls at him, but Phil meets his stare. He’s not sure the Widow can be salvaged, but he’s not going to admit that until he’s certain that she can’t. If Fury decides the Widow is a real threat to Phil’s team, the Widow will disappear, quietly and completely.

                “Keep her in line,” Fury says, finally. “And don’t interfere with the intel teams.”

                _Intel teams_ , Coulson thinks, and does his best to keep the distaste off his face.

                “Nick,” he says, “I always respect my colleagues.”

                “Nobody respects those shady motherfuckers,” Fury says. “All I’m asking is that you don’t let Barton chase them off.”

                “Of course not,” Phil says.

                Anyway, it’s a ridiculous insinuation. If anyone’s going to chase them off, Phil would put his money on Jason.

 

 

 

                She barely sleeps. She doesn’t like this place. She doesn’t know these people. When lying curled on the floor gets tedious, she stretches, checking the limits of her body. The broken ribs are problematic, but it’s hardly the worst thing that’s ever happened to her.

                Sometime in the early hours of the morning, she hears footsteps and watches as the space under her door flickers, filling with light as the sniper sits up and then gets to his feet.

                She presses her ear to the door, but she can’t make out the words in the muffled conversation. The tones seem calm, though. Friendly, even. When the locks on the door click open, she moves several feet away from the door, but she keeps her hands loose at her sides, not fists.

                Someone knocks on the door. She stares at it. A moment later, there’s another set of knocks, this time at a faster tempo, upbeat. She assumes the second knock was the sniper, and that somehow makes her feel better, soothes the anxious thump of her heart.

                Whoever is outside that door will come in when they like. Whenever they like. And they will do whatever they have decided they need to do.

                It makes no sense to think of the sniper’s knock as a safeguard, as a guarantee that she is safe. She isn’t, and he couldn’t help her either way.

                Still, she darts forward and repeats the knock, replicates it exactly, and then twists the handle and pulls, opening the door a half-inch before taking several long steps back, giving herself space.

                “Hey, good morning,” Hawkeye calls, through the small opening between the door and the jam. “You okay in there? Can we open the door?”

                “Who’s with you?” She asks, more to see if he’ll answer than because she thinks the answer matters.

                “It’s Coulson,” Hawkeye says. “He brought breakfast.”

                She hesitates, but there’s nothing to be won by stalling. “You can open the door.”

                Hawkeye pushes the door open and then stands there, leaning against the doorframe, a smear of cream cheese on his chin and a bagel in his hand. His hair is a rumpled blonde mess, and there’s a mark on his face from where he must have slept with his face smashed into the seam of the pillow. He smiles at her, and his eyes are red, like he didn’t sleep well, but his body language is loose and relaxed.

                “Hey,” he says, waving his bagel at her. “You wake up looking like that? That’s bullshit.”

                “You look charming.” It isn’t a lie. There’s something reassuring in the leisurely line of his shoulders, in the relaxed, easy way he’s looking at her. People who know her, who know what she does, never look at her like that. “The cream cheese on your chin,” she adds, “is really what makes it.”

                “Told you,” Hawkeye says, turning to Coulson. “People see food on your face, they think you’re a provider. They think, ‘there’s a man who can afford to eat.’”

                “Yes,” Coulson says, agreeably. “I have no idea why I ever questioned you.”

                There is no food on his face. There’s nothing mussed or relaxed or lived-in about him. But the look he directs at Hawkeye is pleasant, too, even if it twists in her chest, makes her feel sad and a little sick.

                _If you have to hurt these men_ , she thinks, looking between Coulson and Hawkeye, _hurt the other one_.

                It’s a bad thought, but a useful one. She’s surprised by the way it makes her feel. She’d thought the capacity for guilt had been burned right out of her.

                “Any of that for me?” She asks, looking for Phil.

                “Of course.” He holds up a tray, and she steps forward to take it. She gets her own bagel, and a cup of orange juice, and a bowl of fresh fruit. She doesn’t get silverware. “You and I have a meeting,” Coulson tells her, “but you can bring that with you. There’s coffee in my office, if you drink it.”

                “He makes the best coffee.” Hawkeye tells her, a little reverently. “He’s got a French press. If you act helpless, he’ll make it for you.”

                “And you just blew your cover. One bad night makes you careless?” Coulson slants an amused look the sniper’s direction, and it’s such a strange thing, that familiarity. It doesn’t seem sexual, and Hawkeye had said that it wasn’t, but she hasn’t seen intimacy like that outside of romantic partnerships and immediate family groups. It’s _odd_.

                “Yeah,” Hawkeye says, grinning, “guess I need some coffee.”

                Coulson rolls his eyes and tips his chin over Hawkeye’s shoulder. “Go ask your teammates,” he says. “I think I can hear them terrorizing the cafeteria staff as we speak.”

                Hawkeye tilts his head Natasha’s direction, and he looks at her for a moment. His expression is soft, friendly and still a little sleepy. Unconcerned. “Go drink Coulson’s coffee.” He says. “Sorry about all the invasive questions he’s gonna ask. Remember, we’re the best choice.”

                He turns and saunters off, bow in hand, gait even and calm. She feels worse, without him. She doesn’t know why.

                She turns to look at Coulson, fingers curling around the edge of her tray. She smiles, sweet and friendly, and he answers with a bland, polite smile of his own. “Coffee?” She asks.

                “Of course,” he says, and turns, leading them down the hallway.

                She trails him, just outside of reaching distance, a half-step back. She has no weapons, not even a spoon or fork, but the tray is sturdy plastic, and she could bash him across the face, open up his forehead, blind him with his own blood.

                _We’re the best choice_ , she thinks. She’s not sure.

_There was good in me, and he found it. I think he can find it in you._

                That one, at least, she knows isn’t true.

                Phil has low expectations for this first meeting. He bases those expectations on his first meetings with the rest of the team. None of them had been particularly illustrious. Clint had spat in his face. Jason and Bucky had aimed guns at him.

                This isn’t technically his first meeting with Widow, but he’s not sure he should count the hospital interactions. She’d been fairly heavily sedated.

                Those sedatives seem to have worn off now, if the graceful way she carries herself and the deadly way she’s wielding that cafeteria tray are anything to go on.

                He gestures her into his office and then shuts the door behind them. She gives him a look for that, eyes flicking briefly between him and the closed door, and he knows that she _wants_ him to see her looking, wouldn’t be careless enough to show any reaction on her face if she didn’t want to, but he’s not going to let her shame him into leaving the door open. He works at SHIELD. Every single agent on his hall has tried to bug his office at least once. Absolutely no one in this organization has any idea how to mind their own business, himself included.

                He leaves the door closed. She looks it at one more time and then turns away and moves farther into his office, her back to the door and to him like she’s not worried about either one.

                He starts preparing the coffee, because it’s better than immediately starting into things. It gives her time to look around, adjust to the new space. He hears her set her tray down on his desk and then he doesn’t hear anything at all as she moves around his office.

                “You have a fish,” she tells him, tone blank. He looks up to see she’s staring at the small aquarium he’s dutifully placed on a table in a corner of his office. She’s frowning down at the fluttery, colorful thing in the tank like she’s not sure what to make of it.

                “Hm,” Coulson says, noncommittal. “Well, a certain engineer certainly wants me to believe that’s a fish.”

                “Oh.” She crouches down and stares at it, confusion giving way to interest. “It’s not?”

                Phil shrugs. “I doubt it.”

                “Then why not cut it open?” She says, tracing her finger slowly across the tank as what _might_ be a perfectly normal betta fish follows curiously along. “Find out for sure?”

                “Because he’s not getting anything through these walls.” Phil says. He pours the boiling water into the French press and sets a timer. “So, if it’s recording, he’ll have to come in here to retrieve it. And it’ll be a bit of a giveaway if he walks in here with a net.”

                “Sloppy,” she tells him. The fish darts away from her, and Phil doesn’t blame it. “Seems like an unnecessary risk.”

                “Yes,” Phil says, “but it’s not worth killing something because it _might_ be harmful.”

                She’s quiet for a moment and then she shifts to her feet, turning to deliver a disapproving look Phil’s direction. “Little heavy-handed,” she says, in the same tone as _Sloppy_.

                Phil suppose that it _was_ a little heavy-handed, but it doesn’t make it any less true. He gestures to the chairs across from his desk. “Care to sit down?”

                “If you’d like,” she says, magnanimous, and settles, cross-legged, into the nearest chair. She grabs half of her bagel from the tray and takes a neat bite, watching Phil expectantly.

                He takes a breath and reminds himself that he dealt with Clint, furious and scared. And Jason, who followed orders as faithfully as he followed fortune cookie advice for the first six months. And Barnes, who still keeps some secrets locked deep enough that Phil doubts he’ll ever hear them.

                He can deal with the Widow. He _has_ to. There is no other option. If he gives up on her, Fury will bargain her off to whatever government needs to be bought, and her whole life will be nothing but someone else’s causes, someone else’s missions.

                “What,” he asks, “is your name?”

                “Natasha Romanoff,” she says, with startling readiness.

                Phil blinks at her. “You—what?”

                “I’m sorry. Did you expect evasiveness?” She smirks at him and takes another bite of her bagel.

                “Obviously.” Phil says. “Any particular reason you’re feeling cooperative?”

                “Is there another way I should feel?” She asks, and brushes crumbs off the knee of her ill-fitting jeans. “You may be too civilized to hold a literal gun to my head, but the metaphorical one’s still there.”

                He grimaces and turns to finish with the coffee. There’s another thirty seconds to go before the timer’s done, but he doesn’t care. He is struck, briefly but intensely, by the idea that she is entirely too young to say things like that so casually.

                “Let’s be professionals,” she tells him, with a small, sharp smile. She accepts the coffee when he hands it to her, and waves off the sugar and cream like he’s insulted her. “You and the rest of SHIELD have a gun to my head. I’d like it to go away.”

                “Is that what you’d like?” Phil asks, because a little over twenty-four hours ago, Jason had his gun pressed under her chin, and she was daring him to pull the trigger.

                “After what I did in Gotham,” she says, “my employers will not take me back. No one’s coming to help me. If I get loose on my own, I will be running from you, and them, and half the world. I’ve made some enemies.”

                She has made a _lot_ of enemies. There aren’t many that seem to know details about her, yet, but Phil can’t imagine she had much time left. The jobs she was doing, the risks she was taking, she’d been drawing the rope around her throat for years, and she’d very nearly found the end of it.

                “Hawkeye says you’re my best choice. He’s sweet.” She’s assessing him, and Phil takes a quick drink of coffee to cover whatever’s on his face. “I am aware that you are my only choice.”

                Phil considers her. He thinks he might want to work with professionals more often, except for the way she makes him feel tired and faintly horrified every time she opens her mouth. It’s not that what’s she saying is so terrible, and it’s not that she looks barely old enough to drive. It’s the confidence in her, the composed, direct way she is navigating this conversation, as if she’s already spent years of her life figuring out what people want from her and selling it to them for a price that suits her.

                “There _are_ other options.” He tells her. She’s most useful if she invests in them, but he won’t win her over by lying to her. “If you turn against your employers, you could go into witness protection. Are you a minor?”

                “I don’t know.” She says and then waves her hand, dismissive, when he frowns at her. “I don’t. I was given several different birthdates. I don’t know which is accurate.”

                “Ah,” Phil says, and takes another drink of coffee. He thinks he’ll end up in Fury’s office after this, breaking into that cabinet where he keeps his emergency flask. “I’ll look into it. If we find anything, I’ll let you know.”

                “I would like that.” The way she says it implies that he’s doing a casual favor. He wonders if that’s because it honestly doesn’t matter to her, or if she doesn’t care because, whatever he brings her, she won’t believe.

                “So, witness protection is an option. If you are a minor, there are programs. You could---”

                “I am not a victim. I am not some lost child.” She gives him the same small, confused frown she’d given him when he’d tried to offer her sugar for her coffee. “Professionals, please.”

                “You could very well be both.” Phil says. “If you don’t even know your birthdate--”

                “The day I was born does not change anything. I know what I am. I would be a risk to whatever program you put me in.” She sips her own coffee, and the look she gives him is deliberately patient. “Don’t put me in with lost lambs, Agent Coulson. I won’t be responsible for what happens to them.”

                With Clint, it had been about convincing him to trust Phil long enough to prove that he was worth that trust. Despite the tumult in the beginning, Clint had been easy. He’d been desperate for anyone who’d look after him, for anything he could rely on, and all Coulson had to do was wait him out.

                Getting Jason had been a bit more difficult. Jason’s walls were higher, and he hadn’t need Coulson the same way Clint had. But, in the end, the same methods had worked. He’d earned Jason’s trust the same way he’d earned Clint’s. He’d just had to be a little flashier about his methods.

                Out of the three of them, Bucky had been the easiest. All he had to do to get Bucky was get Jason first.

                All three of them had spent years getting manipulated and betrayed by the people they trusted. But all three of them had _memories_ of a better time, of people they’d loved, even if those people ultimately failed them. He doesn’t see that in Widow. He doesn’t see anything other than calculation, patience, and threat.

                “Professionals,” he says, with a sigh. “SHIELD is interested in hiring you.”

                “Yes,” she says, with a nod. “I’d imagine so.”

                Coulson believes in SHIELD. He’s dedicated his life and his team to its purpose. People who see SHIELD as a job will treat it the same way, and he has no room on his team for someone who isn’t invested in the idea that what they do is more important than who they are.

                But he doesn’t need her on his team. All he needs is for her to stay in SHIELD, prove herself useful, and convince Fury that she’s worth more as a tool than she is as a bargaining chip.

                “With your skills, and your knowledge, there are any number of ways you can be useful. You still have a choice.” He watches as she sets her bagel aside and fixes him with an intent, focused look. “Do you have any particular limitations to what you’d like to do for us?”

                She stares at him. Her index finger taps against her coffee cup, and he doesn’t know if she does it on purpose, if she wants him to notice or not, but she’s tapping Clint’s knock at him, the one he’d used to talk to her this morning, the one he uses to wake Coulson up on the few days he manages to wake up before him.

                “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” She says it the same way she’s said everything else, and there’s no unusual tension or tell in her body language, but it seems, somehow, to weigh heavier than anything she’s told him so far.

                “Fine,” he says, with a nod. “That’s workable, provided you mean hurt them directly. We’ll want information on everyone who’s ever employed you.”

                She blinks at him. He thinks he’s startled her. It’s more affirming than it probably should be, given the context. “Hurting people,” she tells him, slowly, “is what I do well.”

                “Yes, you’re very talented.” She is. Just behind them, in the cabinet against the wall, he has a drawer full of files with crime scene photographs to testify to that. “All of my agents have talents that I choose not to use. Again, I don’t ask people to do work that will actively destroy them. If you’re embracing pacifism, that’s fine. I’d like to register that this is a truly inconvenient time for it, but your value isn’t irrevocably tied to your ability to kill other human beings.”

                “I don’t just kill them.” She says, re-crossing her legs and leaning forward to swap her coffee for orange juice.

                “Yes, I know.” He’s starting to look back on Clint spitting in his face with a frankly disturbing nostalgia. “SHIELD is interested in the information you have. If you’re willing to provide that information, we could limit the terms of your employment to that, for now.”

                “And I stay here?” She says. “I live here?”

                Phil grimaces a little and the nods. “Unfortunately, you’ll be confined to that room for some time. You’re a security risk.”

                “The room’s not bad.” She goes still. Phil waits while she thinks her way through it. Optimistically, he decides to take it as a small sign of trust, that she’s even willing to allow the conversation to slip into silence, to let him see a hint of hesitation.

“They haven’t given me any reason to be loyal,” she says, finally. “If I turn on them and they find me, they’ll kill me.”

                Phil thinks that was probably their version of giving her a reason to be loyal. He imagines it lost its hold on her sometime around the moment she walked into Hawkeye’s sights and waited for a bullet.

                “This facility has never been breached,” Phil tells her. Which is true. Not physically, anyway, and most of the digital intrusions had been due to Stark’s relatively benevolent but absolutely endless curiosity. “You’ll be safe here.”

                She smiles at him, and it’s barbed. It’s _mean_. “Professionals,” she reminds him.

He holds her gaze. “It’s a professional promise.”

                She shakes her head a little, smile shrinking, and finishes her juice. “Then I suppose,” she says, “I’m gainfully employed.”

                It had taken weeks to get Clint to sign up. Months, for Jason and Bucky. He has the Widow in under forty-eight hours, but it’s not a victory. It’s just maneuvering. He hasn’t won anything, and he sure as hell hasn’t won her over.

                “Excellent,” he says, because he supposes, in the scheme of things, it’s better than getting a gun aimed in his face. “I’ll let them know you’re ready for intake.”

 

 

 

                “All we’re saying is,” Jason holds his fork and knife out in front of him, casually, and not at all like he’s preparing to block any punches Clint might throw at his face, “maybe don’t fall in love with the first stray you take home.”

                “That’s not what we’re saying.” Bucky says, because he’s a traitor and an asshole. “No one’s saying that. Clint, don’t---”

                A fork and knife make excellent tools to block a fist, but they do fuck-all about the water Clint throws in his face.

                “ _Fuck_ ,” Jason says. “Goddamn it.”

                “That’s to help you wake up.” Clint stabs a piece of waffle off his plate and brings it to his mouth, chews it with unusual ferocity. “You’re dreaming.”

                “Who taught him metaphors? Did you teach him metaphors? Because, sweetheart, it was a fucking _mistake_.” Jason says, grabbing Bucky’s arm so he can wipe his face off with the sleeve of his sweater.

                “You deserved that,” Bucky says, but he grabs Jason’s chin and wipes at his face with a napkin, so Jason has trouble taking it too personally.

                “Could’ve been the coffee.” Clint gives Jason a meaningful look over the rim of his coffee cup, and Jason just rolls his eyes.

                “Oh, bullshit,” Jason knows the only reason he didn’t get a steaming mug of coffee thrown in his face is that Clint loves coffee more than he loves making a point. He’s the only one on the team who does, except maybe Coulson.

                “I’ve got a clear head on this.” Clint says. “I’m not falling in love. Don’t be weird.”

                “Just don’t let her lure you into bed, Jailbait. You’re a sweet kid, and she’s a--”

                “Watch it,” Clint says, exactly like an idiot who’s in love with a stray.

                “She’s an _international criminal_.” Jason says, hands out. “Jesus Christ, what did you think I was gonna say?”

                “Not that.” Clint shrugs and doesn’t look apologetic. “You’re an international criminal. So’s Buck.”

                Jason snorts. “Yeah, and don’t end up in our bed, either.”

                “That’s fucking gross, Jay,” Clint says, grimacing and swallowing the mouthful of waffle like its taste had suddenly taken on some disturbing undertones. “C’mon, I’m trying to eat here.”

                “She’s going to manipulate you.” Bucky says, softer than Jason. More serious, too. “It’s the weapon she has, so she’s going to use it. Any hold she can get, she’ll use to her advantage.”

                “Who the fuck wouldn’t?” Clint says, incredulous. “Look, guys, I appreciate your concern. It’s real sweet. But I’ve actually worked for SHIELD longer than either one of you. I’m _fine_ on this. I know what she is. But she also looks about the same age I was when I got here, and I had Coulson. She’s got no one. So I’m gonna be on her side, and if it fucks me over—I mean….” He gestures at them. “Why the hell else do I keep you around, if not to clean up my messes?”

                “Ha,” Jason says, because, out of the three of them, Clint’s cleaned up more messes than the other two combined. He’s steady like that. Loyal and reliable and stronger than Jason ever remembers to give him credit for. “If she screws with you, I’m gonna break her Goddamn neck.”

                “See?” Clint says, rolling his eyes. “I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

 

 

 

                Coulson sends someone for Jason, which is how Jason knows it’s supposed to be kept quiet. It’s a junior agent, maybe twenty-two, with the stiffness of a recent military career and the unending loyalty of someone Coulson had taken out of a bad situation. She locks eyes with Jason across the cafeteria and tips her chin to one side, and Jason gets to his feet immediately, squeezing Bucky’s shoulder briefly as he goes.

                “Gonna go fix my hair,” he says, gesturing at his head. “Since some asshole’s getting into watersports.”

                “Oh, fucking,” Clint flails, chokes, spits waffle back onto his plate. “ _Come on_.”

                “Baby bird needs some help eating, Buck.” Jason says. “Time to get the dropper again.”

                “That was _one time_ ,” Clint says, “and there were a lot of barbiturates involved. Bucky, how do you shut him up?”

                Bucky clears his throat, and Jason grins, wolfish, and winks at Barton. “How the hell do you think?”

                Clint groans and buries his head in his hands. Bucky looks between Jason and the agent, and he doesn’t quite nod, but he inclines his head, just a little. Jason’s out of the cafeteria before Clint notices he’s got a shadow.  

                “If we’re killing her,” Jason says, low and a little pissed, “it’s real shitty that he’s asking me to do it.”

                “We’re not killing her.” The agent says, and Jason appreciates how forthright she is. Military types tend to annoy the hell out of him, but he can’t fault their directness. “Coulson wants you to take her through intake.”

                “He wants _me_?” Jason’s confused by that for about five seconds, before he figures it out. “Oh, Goldilocks solution. Fucking swell.”

                Bucky would be too cold. Clint would be too warm. Jason’s not quite right, but he’s better than either alternative.

                “Fine,” he says, running a hand through his hair and trying to smooth it back into something that’ll trick people into thinking he’s a professional. “Let’s go.”

 

 

 

                Red Hood arrives to escort her. Coulson smiles when he comes into his office without knocking, and she looks between them, trying to read the way they look at each other.

                “Oh, good,” Coulson says. “You’re here.”

                “Ready to comply,” he replies, with a shrug, and Coulson grimaces like it’s a joke in terrible taste.

                “Medical,” Coulson says. “And HR. Thank you.”

                Red Hood gives him a jaunty, vaguely disrespectful salute and then looks to Natasha. “C’mon, kid,” he says, “let’s get this over with.”

                He takes her to HR first, and she’s not sure what to make of that. She’s not sure it matters what order they go in, or that Jason takes her to HR when Couslon had listed Medical first. She’s not sure if he does that deliberately, if he has to bend every order he’s given, or if HR’s closer, or if he knows, somehow, that going to HR first will be easier than Medical. Or maybe there’s no reason for it at all. Red Hood’s mercurial temperament makes him difficult to read.

                The people at HR are exceedingly professional. They give her an endless series of forms, and she dutifully provides the answers she has. She gets stuck, early on, staring at a question she can’t answer honestly and wondering if it’s best to provide a reasonable cover or leave it blank. A lie may never be noticed, but a blank space is hard to overlook. Is it better, she wonders, to be honest or to be unnoticed? Which will serve better, in the end?

                “If you don’t know,” Red Hood says, “you can just leave ‘em blank. ‘s what Buck did.” He’s been sprawled out in the other chair across from the HR woman’s desk, head leaned against the back of the chair like he intends to sleep through this, as soon as he can be bothered to close his eyes.

                _Buck_ is _Bucky Barnes_ is the Winter Soldier. She knows his name, but she can’t remember any of the others mentioning it in front of her before.

                She blinks at Red Hood, slow and focused.

                “I just made shit up.” He adds, with a shrug. “Coulson got pissed about that, though. Made me fill them out again, right after a seventy-two hour mission from hell. So maybe don’t do that. Unless it’s funny, in which case, go right ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

                She doesn’t say anything, but she leaves the questions she can’t answer blank. When she returns the form, the woman’s eyebrows twitch upwards at all the empty space, but she doesn’t say anything.

                “Thank you,” she tells Natasha, with the kind of gentle smile that suggests she has no idea who Natasha is. “Phil said you needed uniforms. Do you know your size?”

                Beside her, Red Hood tenses. Now Natasha has _Phil Coulson_ , and she wishes they’d stop being so careless around her. She will use whatever she’s given, and she refuses to feel guilty about that. But it would make things less complicated if they stopped giving her so _much_.

                Natasha lists off her measurements, because that, at least, she knows by heart. When they leave HR, they leave with a bag of clothes that hangs idly from Red Hood’s wrist, and Natasha wonders if that’s meant as a favor or a threat.

 

 

 

                In Medical, Red Hood throws himself down on the examination table and stares up at the ceiling, humming what sounds like Metallica to himself while the doctor asks her questions. She answers these easily, and readily. She knows her physical body; it’s her history that she can’t always pin down.

                The doctor is a quiet man, mid-thirties, with a kind smile and delicate wrists. He doesn’t blink as she lists off her medical history, doesn’t flinch at the broken bones and concussions and surgeries and poisonings. When he’s out of questions, he nods toward the examination table.

                “We’ll need to do a physical--”

                “Oh, blow me, Doc,” Red Hood says, suddenly opting to be involved in the conversation. Natasha and the doctor both turn to blink at him, and the expression on his face is long-suffering and stubborn. “You got parental consent for that strip search?”

                “Are there parents whose consent we can request?” The doctor asks, in mild tones. Natasha wonders how many recalcitrant, twitchy agents he’s had to deal with in his tenure as a SHIELD doctor.

                “She just got roofied and felt up by the last batch of SHIELD docs.” Red Hood sits up and swings his legs over the side of the table. It’s not clear to Natasha if he has to fight every single person he meets, or if there’s something about his working life that makes him especially belligerent. “You can jerk off to x-rays or their notes, but we’re skipping the hospital gowns this time.”

                “If you think I’m being unprofessional---”

                “It’s fine,” Natasha says. She levels a calm look at Red Hood’s incredibly skeptical one. “I don’t mind.”

                “Good thing you don’t get to make your own decisions for the foreseeable future.” He jumps down from the table, boots stomping against the linoleum with a certain finality. “Doc, you gonna give her some pain meds for the ribs?”

                The doctor stares at Jason for a moment and then he sighs, clicks his pen, and writes a few more notes in her file. “I’ll tell Coulson the examination was incomplete. You’ll get medication at breakfast and dinner. Take it after you’ve eaten.”

                “Of course,” Natasha says. “Thank you.”

                The doctor stands up, and he’s at least two inches shorter than Red Hood, but the look he gives him is resigned rather than intimidated. “Let’s do x-rays,” he says, gesturing them toward the door. “We’ll check those ribs.”

 

 

 

                Hawkeye is sitting cross-legged in front of her door when Red Hood walks her back. “Hey, Jailbait,” Jason says, “you owe me, like. An entire keg. We just got back from HR _and_ Medical.”

                Hawkeye snorts and climbs to his feet. He gives Natasha a sympathetic look. “Did Jason box any of the nurses?”

                “Told a doctor to blow him,” she reports, softly. She’s still turning that over in her head, wondering about it.

                Hawkeye rolls his eyes, but the look he gives Red Hood is fond. “Thanks,” he says, sounding genuinely grateful.

                “Yeah,” Red Hood shrugs and looks uncomfortable. “Here you go, Red,” he says, handing the bag of clothing to Natasaha.

                She takes it with a blink, wondering at the coincidence of the two of them calling each other by the same nickname. Not that she’s called him anything, not out loud. _Red_ , she thinks, _Black Widow._ Neither one is her name.

                “I’m Natasha,” she says, for no reason.

                “I’m Jason,” he says, with no apparent need or justification. He smirks at the look she gives him. “Kid, if you come after me, knowing my Goddamn name isn’t gonna save you. And _not_ knowing my name isn’t gonna save me.”

                She supposes that’s fair. But if she comes after him, she won’t do it directly. It’s not him that he should worry about having to save.

                “Thanks.” She’s thanking him for the clothes, or the escort, or the interference in the exam. She’s not sure. She’s not even sure that the emotion she’s feeling is gratitude.

                “Anytime, kid,” he waves at her and then sets off, leaving her alone in the hallway with Hawkeye.

                “My name’s Clint Barton.”

                She closes her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to know that. Out of all of them, he’s the one she wants to know the least about. “Don’t tell me things like that.”

                He shrugs at her like he hasn’t done anything wrong. “If Jay took you to HR, then you’re working with us now. Are you on Coulson’s team?”

                “I don’t think I’m on anyone’s team.” She’s not sure of her status. She’s worried about that, but there doesn’t seem to be much she can do about it yet.

                “Oh, that’s shitty.” Barton frowns and gives her a thoughtful look. “You should ask Coulson about that. Some of the other handlers are fine, but Coulson’s the best.”

                She’s not sure if he’s naïve or if he has information that she doesn’t. She’s not sure what to do with the amount of faith he has in Phil Coulson. “I don’t think he wants someone like me on his team.”

                “Nah, fuck that. Of course he does. It’s Coulson. He wants the best. He doesn’t care if they show up a little damaged.” He makes a face at the look she gives him and then runs a quick, distracted hand through his hair.  “I mean, there’s Jason, obviously, and he’s 95% disaster, but I’m talking about myself, too. I mean, I’m an orphan from Iowa who ran away to join the _circus_. Coulson never cared about any of that shit. He’s the first person who didn’t throw me away.”

                “Yet,” she says. She doesn’t mean to be cruel. Cutting the infection out of a person, before it can spread, is a kindness. “He hasn’t thrown you away yet.”

                “You don’t know him,” Barton says. There is an unwelcome surety in his voice. There is not much she can do with the truly devote. They have to be either tricked or destroyed; they will not turn against their masters.

                “Trust me,” Barton says, “when he first found me, I gave him every Goddamn reason there is to get rid of me. And, when the other two signed up, they found a few more. But he hasn’t. He won’t. That’s not who he is.”

                Everyone she has ever known has a breaking point, a threshold of pain or a tolerance for temptation that can be reached or overcome, as necessary. She has encountered, once or twice, a person whose breaking point existed beyond the limitations of their physical bodies. That’s heroism, she thinks, to break your body before your word.

                She doesn’t know if she would apply that label to Coulson. She knows what his weaknesses are. He’s buried them in other people, which is inconvenient and messier than she’d expect. She thinks she could puppet him around with a stiletto buried in Barton’s neck, slid neatly between arteries, ready to rip him open the second she doesn’t get what she wants.

                She doesn’t like the way her mind works, but the way her mind works is the only reason she’s still alive.

                “We are not the same,” she says. “I hurt people.”

                “Yeah,” Barton says, “I know. I hurt people, too.”

                “You kill them.” He’s a sniper, and there’s something callous in that, something cold that nice people don’t like to dwell on, but the work she does is different. “I do that, but only after I’m done with them.”

                Barton sighs and shrugs. “Yeah,” he says, “I work in this business, too.”

                She has nothing to say to that. He keeps ignoring every warning she gives. She doesn’t see any reason to keep giving them.

                “C’mon,” he says, nodding up the hall. “Coulson says you’ve got clearance to be in the cafeteria, if one of us is with you. Let’s get lunch.”

                If she were a better person, she’d send him away. But she isn’t. She goes with him.

 

 

 

                Every morning, Barton or Jason or Coulson end up outside her door. For the first week, Barton stays camped outside her door all night. He stops the day Jason shows up with a pillow and a scowl, waving a stack of forms in front of him, and clarifying, to the belief of absolutely no one, that Coulson has finally noticed he was two months behind on his reports. They take turns after that, for another week, until Coulson shows up one evening with a man at his heels, and they install a deadbolt on Natasha’s side of the door.

                Barton looks inordinately pleased with himself. “You good?” He asks her, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as he shoots a triumphant grin at Coulson’s retreating back.

                “I’m good.” She tells him. She was always good. A deadbolt isn’t much better than no lock at all. Not really. Not in the ways that count.

                But she feels better knowing that someone is going to have to make noise to get inside. No one will get in without waking her up. She will have some chance to change or minimize what happens to her.

                That first night without anyone at her door, she doesn’t sleep. The second night, she manages to nap for fifteen minute stretches at a time. But a week in, after no one bothers her, she falls into a deep sleep and doesn’t wake up until Barton knocks on her door in the morning.

                They usually get breakfast together. If it’s Barton or sometimes Jason, they go to the cafeteria, and she can pick whatever she likes. No one seems to care how much food she eats, and Jason and Barton both catch her sneaking food into her pockets to stash in her room, but neither one says anything.

                Coulson brings her breakfast, but he’s thoughtful about it. He brings things he knows she likes.

                She takes the medication SHIELD gives her. It’s only ever a mild painkiller. After two weeks, they stop, and she’s glad. She would have taken anything that ended up on her plate, but she had never welcomed it or wanted it.

                After breakfast, they take her to see her intel handlers. She has three agents assigned to her, and they rotate on no discernible pattern.

                The older woman is her favorite, because she’s nearly robotic in her mannerisms, doesn’t ever flinch or smile, just asks questions in a pleasant monotone and doesn’t blink, no matter what Natasha tells her.  

                The man is the trickiest one, with his thick-rimmed glasses and shy voice and soft, sympathetic questions that trip her like razorwire into the very worst of her memories. He’s thorough, empathetic enough to spot weak spots that the older woman would miss, and ruthless enough to exploit those weaknesses until she gives up things she thought she would never, ever say out loud.

                The young woman is the only cruel one. The others are cold, and dedicated, and professional. The woman must have something to prove. She’s new, or she has a series of failures in her file. It’s not that she touches Natasha more than the other two; the older woman is endlessly detail-oriented, and will direct Natasha through reenactments, correct things Natasha remembers incorrectly or doesn’t want to admit, and the man has a series of comforting physical affections – a light hand on her shoulder, a pat on her hand, a mug of coffee or tea pressed into her grip – that he’ll use when he deems it helpful. The young woman is the only one who hurts her.

                It’s barely pain. It’s meant to imply that there _could_ be more, if Natasha ever becomes uncooperative. She doesn’t, so it never develops, but this only seems to frustrate the woman. She’s ill-suited to this kind of interrogation, Natasha thinks. She’d be happier in the kind of interrogation room where they have to set drains into the floor.

                Natasha tolerates it for months. It’s nothing. It’s petty, more insulting than harmful. The man does far more damage, although there’s some comfort in the way he does it. “Like lancing a wound,” he says, once, after a day that ends with Natasha breathing slowly and carefully, desperately trying not to throw up. “It hurts. I know. But keep it in, and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

                It’s not that the woman is hurting her. It’s that there is no purpose in it. She takes information that the other interrogators earned, and she uses it to hurt Natasha, for no reason. She harvests the very worst things Natasha has done, and she feeds them back to her, and, if Natasha is not appropriately penitent, she allows herself to get angry, in order to justify the ways she harms her.

                Natasha can fake any emotion at any moment. Almost. There are things she doesn’t like to think about. When they’re pulled out of the carefully locked boxes she keeps them in, she freezes. Despite all her training, she’s human.

                It’s counterproductive. It makes her guarded with the other interrogators. She doesn’t have to trust them, but she needs to relax around them, or she can’t give them anything. If they think she’s lying to them, evading them, they’ll mark her as hopeless. If she’s hopeless, she can’t stay here, at SHIELD, won’t have breakfast with Barton or a deadbolt on her door, will have to run again, without anyone to give her food or sleep outside her door.

                She provokes the interrogator. She lets herself find her weakest points, and she plays into them, rips at them, pushes and digs until the woman’s temper breaks.

                The next morning, at breakfast, she reaches across the table to steal an orange off of Jason’s tray. Her sleeve rides up just far enough to show the ring of purple bruises around her wrist. She doesn’t look at his face, but she can see the tightening of his jaw in the corner of her eye. Bucky’s spoon jars against the rim of his bowl.

                She’s glad it was the pair of them. She’d have hidden it from Hawkeye, and she’s not sure if Coulson would’ve intervened.

                Five days later, she gets an older male interrogator who is so endlessly nonchalant about everything she tells him that she finds herself giving up more detail than necessary, just to see if she can get a reaction out of him. His sense of humor, when he deigns to use it, is so sharp that it can almost make her flinch. His hands stay on his pen, or behind his head, or, when he’s particularly bored by her, pressed over his eyes as he sighs like a disaffected teenager. He never touches her.

                Jason doesn’t take her to breakfast for twenty-three days after that, although Bucky shows up with Barton, sometimes, and doesn’t seem any different.

                When she finally opens the door in the morning to see Jason at her doorstep, he glares at her. “If it happens again,” he says, hands shoved in his pockets, expression either angry or hurt, “use your fucking words. I don’t like being manipulated.”

                “I’m sorry,” she says. She is. Not for her actions, but for what it’s done to him. She has a hard time finding solutions to her problems that don't involve using other people.

                “Yeah, well, I’m not,” Jason says. “You’re in therapy now, asshole. And Coulson’s on my side, so good fucking luck getting out of this one.”

                Therapy, she learns, is exactly like interrogation, except there are never any right answers. She doesn’t mind it, but she doesn’t see how any part of it is productive.

                Still, she thinks, when Jason routinely shows up to walk her to her sessions and back, sometimes taking her through various breakrooms to steal pastries on the way, it’s an easy price to pay.

                She thinks about the endpoint, when she runs out of information and SHIELD no longer has a use for her. She hasn’t felt dread like this in some time. This, she knows, is why it’s stupid to get attached to things. She’s not the type of person who gets to keep her grip on anything good.

                When she runs, she will be rested and well-fed. That will make the chase longer, but it won’t change the outcome.


	4. Chapter 4

                Phil stopped getting angry with Nick years ago. He learned, over time, that it was more or less useless. Nick was never going to prioritize anyone’s feelings over the effectiveness of his plans. No matter how many years they’d worked together.

                “Is there a reason you’re being difficult?” Nick asks him, three weeks after Phil starts redacting information from his team’s reports before he submits them.

                It’s useless to get angry. The only way to get Nick’s attention is to get even. And the only way to get even is to take something away from him that he cares about.

                Phil smiles; it’s not one of his nice ones. “You’re interfering with my team.”

                “You interfered with the intel teams,” Nick counter-accuses. Phil appreciates that he doesn’t even bother to deny it. “I told you not to do that.”

                “Jason interfered, without orders. Although, I did research the interrogator after she was replaced.” Phil pushes a folder across the desk. “You sent a field agent to beat up Natasha.”

                Nick doesn’t touch the folder. He aims a scowl at Phil that might have intimidated him, ten years ago. “I sent a field agent with intelligence experience,” he says. “And she didn’t _beat up_ anyone.”

                Phil raises his eyebrows and reminds himself, firmly, that he is not Jason Todd, and he doesn’t need to turn everything into a screaming argument. “She left bruises on a compliant teenage girl.”

                “We don’t know how old she is.”

                “Is that really the route you want to take?” Phil asks. “You interfered with my team, sent someone to smack around a girl who is effectively a prisoner, and you want to argue birthdates?”

                Fury’s scowl gets meaner, and Phil’s still not intimidated, but he understands he’s being warned. “Maybe you need a new team,” Nick says. “Seems like you’re catching their insubordination problem.”

                Phil leans back and takes a breath. It’s an empty threat. He knows that. No one else in SHIELD would take his team. The only option would be to break them team into pieces, with Barton sent to a team that needs a sniper and Jason and Bucky sent off to work as a pair, and Phil can’t imagine that any one of them would react well to the news that they were being split up.

                No one’s taking his team away from him. Still, it isn’t a comforting thought.

                “I didn’t interfere with the intel teams,” Phil says. “Jason and Bucky saw the bruises, and Jason reported them to me. He chose to report them _after_ he’d had private meetings with all three of her interrogators, but that’s hardly surprising.”

                “Todd’s problem with authority figures---”

                “Has been improving,” Phil says, right over him. “Jason trusts me. He has been _learning_ to trust SHIELD. If you have a problem with Jason’s reluctance to trust authority figures, maybe you should stop confirming every paranoid suspicion he has.”

                “Insubordination,” Nick reminds him.

                “Don’t bullshit me, Nick,” Phil says, because everything about this has been bullshit. Natasha isn’t his agent, but she’s his responsibility. He should’ve been notified. “This is my team. I know them. If you’d told me what you were planning, I would have told you why it was a bad idea. Or do you honestly think giving someone like Bucky Barnes a reason to question our moral integrity is a good plan? How’s that working out for his last organization?”

                Nick glares at him, and Phil frowns back, and they hold the stalemate for a long moment before Nick sighs. “I wanted to know what she’d do,” Nick says. “Ideally, she’d have gone to you. She didn’t.”

                “Of course she didn’t,” Phil says. “She probably assumed I ordered it.”

                “Worst case scenario,” Nick continues, “would’ve been Barton.”

                Phil had considered that. Briefly, and only long enough to trace the consequences of it. If she’d gone to Clint, he wouldn’t have handled it as efficiently as Jason. The trouble with people who get hurt young is that they are forever trying to reuse the first coping mechanisms they learn. Jason’s all fight, but Clint’s instincts run the opposite way. He likes space between himself and threats.

                If Phil got very, very lucky, Clint would’ve seen those bruises and come running to him, with Natasha in tow. If he got extraordinarily lucky, Clint wouldn’t have shot or otherwise incapacitated anyone while he broke himself and Natasha out of the facility.

                “If you ask anyone on this team to choose between a bully and a victim,” Phil says, “they’re going to pick the victim.”

                “She’s not a victim,” Nick says. “She’s a murderer.”

                “Everyone on my team is a killer,” Phil says. “And so is everyone in this room.”

                Nick’s eyebrows tick up. “You’ve got a good team, Phil. But you have a _young_ team. And you brought the Black Widow home like she’s something we can tame. But what if we can’t? What happens to your team then?”

                Phil knows what they say about his team, about their inability to follow protocol or play well with others. About Clint’s habit of jailbreaking himself out of Medical, and Jason’s tendency to pick fights with other agents, and Bucky’s willingness to enforce his own moral compass, in violation of mission parameters if need be. He knows every single one of the unkind nicknames.

                “Don’t look at me like that, Phil,” Nick says, which is Phil’s first indication that he has any kind of look on his face at all. “I know exactly how valuable your team is. Which is why you need to be careful. The Black Widow’s a manipulator. That’s what she _does_.”

                “I know what she does,” Phil says. “That’s why I never gave her a reason to turn against us.”

                “There are a million reasons to turn against us,” Nick says. “There always will be. There’s always going to be someone who offers her money, or freedom, or whatever she thinks she can’t get from us. I had to know if there was anything human left in her.”

                “So you pushed her until she got desperate enough to act out?”

                “I pushed her to see which way she’d run. I was hoping she’d go to you.” He’s still for a second and then he shrugs. “But Barnes and Todd, that’s acceptable. She has Barton, and she didn’t use him.”

                Phil slowly shakes his head. He stands up and grabs the file off the desk; he’s not trusting anything that belongs to him to Nick’s care for a while.

                 “Don’t interfere with my team again,” he says. “Especially not for something like that. You think it’s some kind of revelation that Natasha is capable of emotional attachment? Nick, she’s kept that paper bird under her pillow for _months_.”

                “You don’t think it’s interesting?” Nick asks. “That she went to Todd, instead of Barton?”

                Of course Phil thinks it’s _interesting_. But he doesn’t like it when Nick plays these mind games with _him_. He likes it even less when he plays them with his team. “I told Jason that, if this ever happens again, he has my permission to skip my office and come straight to yours.”

                “Is that a threat?” Nick’s watching him closely, but he’s smiling that sideways, slanted smile that always manages to make him look like he’s getting exactly what he wanted.

                “If a meeting with an agent sounds like a threat to you,” Phil says, “maybe you should reconsider how you treat them.”

 

 

 

                It took Natasha years to live the secrets she gives away in minutes. Even though it seems, somehow, that every aspect of her life is some manner of interesting to SHIELD, her secrets are still a finite resource. She is running out.

                She does not panic. It has never done any good, and it is mostly trained out of her at this point. But she will admit that she gets somewhat anxious.

                “Oh, you’re doing that again?” Jason asks, one morning, when she pockets an orange after breakfast. “Thought you were over that.”

                The stash of food she keeps in her room is limited; she doesn’t have many belongings, and she certainly doesn’t have anything that would conceal a significant supply of food. She maintains freshness by rotating her stock.

                Natasha doesn’t blink or drop her hand to where the orange is tucked securely into her sweater pocket. “In case I get hungry later.”

                “Sure,” Jason says. “Because you didn’t just choke your way through a bowl of oatmeal the size of your head or anything.”

                She’s been doubling her meals, trying to add weight. It’s cold outside. She’ll need the stored energy, and whatever insulation she can manage.

                “You bulking?” Jason asks, as he steers them toward the interrogation rooms. “Because you’re eating like Buck.”

                “If I wanted to see Agent Coulson,” she says, “how do I request a meeting?”

                “You wanna see Coulson?” Jason tips his head back, eyebrows pinching together for a second before he shrugs. “Sure, fuck it. Let’s take you to Coulson.” He changes directions abruptly, hand lighting on her shoulder just long enough to shift her in the right direction.

                “No, I didn’t mean---”

                “Kid, you’re his problem,” Jason says, misreading the look on her face. “It’s his job to meet with you. If you want to talk to him, let’s go.”

                “He might be busy.” Coulson seems like a man who stays busy. He seems like a man whose team _keeps_ him busy. And Natasha isn’t ready to meet with him yet. She isn’t sure how to ask for what she needs.

                “Sure,” Jason says, with a shrug, “but not too busy to meet with you, if you’re having some sort of problem.”

                “I’m not having any problems.” She isn’t. She can eat whatever and however much she wants. She has clothes, and a bed, and books that Barton brings her, so she won’t be bored at night. Her door locks, and no one tries to get in anyway. Her interrogators keep their hands to themselves, and people look at her, sometimes, when she’s in the cafeteria or walking in the hallways, but she always has Jason, Barton, Coulson, or Barnes with her, and their presence discourages anything beyond quick, considering looks.

                The only problem she has is that this place charges a rent she cannot keep paying. The problem is that she’ll have to leave.

                “You’re stashing food again.” Jason gestures at her pocket, and Natasha narrows her eyes at him. “Shit, kid, I’m not gonna take it away from you. No one’s gonna take your food away from you. But if something’s bothering you and you don’t want to tell me about it, by all damn means, let’s get you to Coulson.”

                Natasha can’t think of a way to redirect him. She’s been careful with him since the time he solved her problem with the female interrogator. She tries not to manipulate him, and she tries not to give the impression of manipulating him, even when she isn’t.

                She’s found, over all, that it has made their conversations a bit stained.

                “Okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

                “Yeah, you’re welcome.” He rolls his eyes at her, but he passes her an apple when they’re almost at Coulson’s office, and she holds it in her hand and stares down at it, impressed that he managed to palm it without her noticing it and confused as to why he’s giving it to her now.

                When they get to Coulson’s office, Jason raps his knuckles against the door and then, without waiting, he twists the door knob and kicks the door open. Coulson looks up from his desk, sees the two of them, and blinks.

                “Time to do your job, Coulson,” Jason calls from the doorway. He puts a hand on her shoulder again, pushes her into the room, and then waves. “She’s got some weird shit going on, and she needs to talk to you.”

                “Yes, thank you, Jason,” Coulson says, with more professionalism in that single exchange than Natasha has seen Jason display the entire time she’s known him. “Natasha,” Coulson says, gesturing at the chair in front of his desk. “Come in.”

                Natasha walks in, apple cradled in her palm, and takes the seat. Behind them, she hears the door swing shut. She doesn’t look back; Jason couldn’t help her, even if he wanted to.

                “You’re alright?” Coulson asks, eyes going briefly to the fruit in her hand. Natasha holds still, doesn’t drop the apple onto the table or hide it in a pocket.

                Hiding things is second nature for her, but the agreement with SHIELD is that she won’t hide anything, ever. Not if they ask directly. Natasha’s only defense has been to control the questions, the things they know to ask her. She holds the apple like it doesn’t matter, and Coulson’s eyes move back up to her face.

                “I’m fine,” Natasha confirms. “Jason brought me here. I didn’t ask him to. I can go to my intel meeting, if you’ll walk me there.”

                She isn’t allowed to be alone anywhere expect her room. She doesn’t know what would happen if she were caught wandering the facility unescorted, but she hasn’t had any reason to find out.

                “He knows where you’re supposed to be,” Coulson says, shooting a look toward the door that Natasha thinks is fond, but might be annoyed. It’s hard to tell with Coulson, sometimes, since the two emotions are so often mingled together. “If he brought you here, he has a reason. Want to tell me what you think it is?”

                It is a kind way to phrase the question. _Want to tell me what you think it is?_ He asks for Jason’s motivation, not her own. She could hide behind that, if hiding behind anything had ever been useful.

                “I would like,” she says, evenly, “to update the conditions of my employment.”

                Coulson’s face flicks through a series of expressions. The most worrisome is the anger that settles, very briefly, across his face, narrows his eyes and tightens his jaw, flatten his mouth into a bloodless line. She’s never seen Coulson angry before. She holds herself still, but her hand curls, unconsciously, around the apple Jason gave her.

                _I’m not gonna take it away from you,_ she hears. _No one’s gonna take your food away from you._

 _He’s the first person who didn’t throw me away_ , from Barton.

                And then, herself. _Yet_. _He hasn’t thrown you away yet._

                “The intel teams,” Coulson says. His tone is calm but unusually brisk. “I was under the impression that your previous problem had been addressed. Have they been---”

                “Oh,” she says, genuinely startled. Coulson falls silent at the interruption, but she understands, suddenly, that the anger she’d seen hadn’t been directed at her. He’d been angry on her behalf. “No,” she says. “There have been no further problems.”

                He nods, once. “Good.”

                She doesn’t understand these people. They are not weak people. She doesn’t understand why they let themselves stay so soft, so easily hurt.

                “What’s going on?” Coulson asks. His voice isn’t gentle, but there is so much patience that Natasha almost pulls away from him. He sounds _concerned_. About her. It is ludicrous and dangerous, and Natasha worries, from her reaction to it, that their softness is infectious. She wonders if she has already been contaminated by it, irredeemably corrupted.

                “I said, at our first meeting, that I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” She watches his face, but there’s nothing this time, no flash of anything she could use. “I’d like to remove that limitation.”

                He considers her for a moment. She expects him to lean back, but he leans forward instead, just a little. Not eager, but assessing. “What are you trying to accomplish?”

                Natasha does not like the way he’s looking at her. She can’t help it; she slips the apple into the pocket of her sweater, right next to her orange, and he watches without comment.

                “I don’t understand the question,” she says, finally.

                “You’re negotiating.” He says it with his hands loose and open, almost beseeching. “We’re professionals, aren’t we? That’s what you asked for. Tell me what you’re trying to accomplish.”

                The longer Natasha spends here, the less like a professional she feels. None of these people seem to know how to behave. She could blame them for the way it’s changing her, but the truth is that she’s letting it happen.

                _Let’s be professionals_ , she’d said, at their first meeting. It was easier to be brave then. It is easy to be brave when the consequences of victory and failure are functionally the same. She has more to lose now.  

                Fear is not a welcome thing. Fear of loss, fear of being alone again. Fear of running, with no one to demand that she be treated well, with no one to watch her door at night or sneak her extra apples or interfere with doctors or interrogators.

                Fear is a _learned_ thing. It is a bad habit. And it is her own fault that she allowed herself to fall back into it again.

                She smiles, and he does not smile back. “I am running out of information to share,” she tells him. “I will not be able to continue to meet the terms of my employment. So I would like to renegotiate them.”

                He stares at her for a moment, and then he sighs, heavily, and leans away. She suppresses the urge to follow him, to lean forward.

                “Natasha,” he says, “what do you think we would do with Clint, if he lost the ability to shoot?”

                It flashes across her brain: Clint, with his fingers broken, smashed to nothing by a hammer, or cut clean off to the last joint. It’s what she would have done, if someone had ordered her to break him instead of bury him. _Break the archer’s hands_. There’s a poetry to it, a cruelty that would make it notorious, teach others not to follow his path.

                It hurts to think of it now. She thinks, if she were ordered to do it, she would find herself incapable. That thought is horrifying. Every single thought in this line of thinking is horrifying. She puts an end to it.

                “You are very fond of him,” she says. “And he has been very loyal. If he were hurt during one of your missions, you would take care of him.”

                The look Coulson gives her is steady. “I said we,” he points out. “I was talking about SHIELD, not myself.”

                Natasha can predict and understand Phil Coulson. She knows what Coulson would do if one of his people were hurt. But SHIELD offered her employment when Coulson seemed hesitant. SHIELD sent an interrogator who hurt her, and Jason, who operates under Coulson even if he pretends not to notice, stopped it.

                She understands Phil Coulson. SHIELD is harder to predict. She could understand it, as an organization, if Phil Coulson weren’t in it. It is difficult to understand how an organization like SHIELD could attract and keep the loyalty of a man like him.

                “SHIELD would do whatever was most useful at the time,” she says, after she’s thought it through. “They’ve lost a sniper, but they wouldn’t want to lose you, or the rest of your team. They’d keep your loyalty by respecting his. Medical retirement, full benefits.”

                He grimaces. “Yes,” he says, after a beat, “I suppose we deserved that.”

                She had not meant to be insulting. It seems, from the look on his face, that she’s managed it anyway.

                “Barton is an exceptional field agent.” Coulson sounds proud. “But his aim isn’t his only skill. If he lost that ability, I’d pull him from the field, and retrain him as an instructor.”

                Natasha thinks about Clint’s persistence, his steadiness. The way he smiles at her, when she’s done something he approves of. She could see how young agents could be coaxed into endless hours of practice, hoping to earn one of those sweet, easy grins. She could see how he would like the work, how sharping young snipers would be both endlessly frustrating and somehow validating for him, the way he could send bullets through proxies, keep working through others.

                Barton is an exceptional field agent. She knows that. She is beginning to understand that Coulson is exceptional in his own way, as well.

                “I’ve read the files,” Coulson says. “And I read Jason’s report. Your close combat skills are remarkable.”

                “I’ve had some training,” Natasha says, and the sad, sour smile Coulson directs at her indicates he knows exactly how much of an understatement that is.

                “Bucky has been training the others,” he says. “It’s not ideal. Jason seems fundamentally confused about appropriate workplace behavior, and Barton—he would prefer to work with someone like you, I think.”

                _Someone like her_. That’s interesting. Something inside her shivers awake at the way Coulson says it. Fear is a bad habit, and so is anger. Natasha has not been angry in a very long time. But something about the way Coulson says that, the implication of it, cracks open a shard of anger that stabs deeper than she would have anticipated.

                “Someone smaller,” she tries. It’s a guess, but a calculated one.

                Coulson blinks at her, and his expression gives her absolutely nothing. “You and Clint, you’ve been getting close.”

                She takes a breath. It’s not a threat. She knows that. She _does_. Phil Coulson is not the sort of man who would make threats like that, and, even if he were, he would not make them against Clint.

                “He’s kind,” she tells him. “Sweet.”

                His smile twists up at her tone of voice, the almost recriminating way she calls Barton _sweet_. “He is,” Coulson agrees. “Don’t let that hold you back, when you’re teaching him.”

                “Professionals,” she reminds him, although she wonders if it is still fair to call herself that.

                “Yes,” he agrees. “I’ll update intel.”

                Some part of her cannot believe it’s that easy, even when Coulson sends her away. _Fear_ , she thinks, again. Fear to hope, fear to believe the promises of powerful men. She needs to be rational. She needs to remain calm.

                Every day she spends here, it gets harder to accept that she will, someday, have to leave.

 

 

 

                Her meetings with intel are slowly decreased. She goes from meeting with them five days a week for a minimum of five hours a day, to meeting them three days a week for four hours, to twice a week for three hours, and, finally, to two hours, once a week. She is asked mostly to provide clarity on the behavior of the people SHIELD has left alive. She is a consultant. She is treated respectfully.

                She trains the others. At first, she only meets with Jason. She understands Coulson’s reasoning. Barnes is the most robust, the least likely to be accidentally or intentionally harmed by her, but Barnes has kept his distance. He remembers her, she thinks, and he is ashamed. She will have to address that, at some point, but it feels unwise to chase after him.

                Chase him, she thinks, and he will run, and she will never catch him. She will have to wait until he comes to her.

                And Barton, of course, is the most breakable of the team. He’s sturdy, and steady, and she thinks everyone who meets him is prone to underestimating him. But he is young, and he does not have the training the others have. So, she starts with Jason.

                “You’re a horrible fucking bitch,” Jason tells her, in their first training session. He’s bleeding from the mouth, because he is both lazy and entirely too careful with her, and it should probably be eerie, the bloody grin he gives her. It feels, instead, like some kind of present.

                “And you’re insulting me,” she tells him. She keeps her own expression completely blank, even though some quiet part of her wants to grin back at him, wants to laugh aloud and throw herself at him, use everything she knows against him in a way that has more in common with a pair of brawling puppies than two dangerous killers.

                _This is not good_ , she thinks. This is another way she will be compromised and corrupted.

                Fear, and anger, and fun. SHIELD is nurturing all manner of vices.

                “C’mon, then,” Jason says, bringing his fists up. He spits blood at her face, and she dodges back so that it hits her shirt instead. It is going to stain. She doesn’t care. Somehow, the idea of carrying some part of him with her feels like armor. “Get back over here, and I promise I won’t insult you again.”

                “Don’t be lazy,” she tells him. She watches his face, but keeps his fists and feet in her peripheral vision. “Work for what you want.”

                This is terrible. She is _bantering_. But Jason falls under the same protections as Clint.

                _You and Clint, you’ve been getting close._

                _Yes, and Jason, too._

                SHIELD is not like her other employers. This facility is not the Red Room. She knows those things to be true, but neither one settles the anxious twisting in her chest.

                _I have never met anyone like Phil Coulson_ , she thinks, instead. And that works, even though she is old enough to know a trap when she steps, unresisting, into the heart of one.  

 

 

 

                Fighting Barton is an education. It’s not that she expects him to be weak. His endearing fondness for sleeveless shirts would have convinced her otherwise, even if she couldn’t tell, by the way he moves, that he keeps himself very fit. She knows he is strong.

                She expects care, though. Gentleness.  She does not expect the blind panic that comes over him, when she first gets her hand around his throat, or the way he pitches himself desperately against it, nearly tearing his own arm out of socket to throw her away from him.

                “Shit,” he says. He’s holding his arm carefully, and she is several yards away, staring. “Sorry.”

                _And Barton—he would prefer to work with someone like you, I think._

She recognizes that kind of panic. It can hit her, too, when someone accidentally plays too close to one of her early, buried memories, the ones that formed in a time before she learned how to burn the pain out of things, harvest the lesson and forget the rest.

                Someone hurt him. When he was young. She wonders if that’s why he keeps calling himself trash.

                _Anger is a bad habit_ , she reminds himself. _And there are no acceptable targets here_.

                “Come here,” she says. “Do it to me. I’ll show you how to get out of it so you hurt them more than you hurt yourself.”

                “I just.” He rocks forward on his feet. His smile twists into something ugly, something ashamed. “I freak out, sometimes. Maybe this is a bad idea.”

                That shard of anger is something living now, thorned and twining. Hungry. Hateful. She swallows it down and smiles at him. “Impossible. I only have good ideas,” she tells him. “Come here.”

                He settles himself, visibly, and then strides forward and puts a careful, calloused hand around her throat. She moves quickly, twists him up and tips him over, so they fall with his back against her chest. His throat is cradled in the crook of her elbow, and she puts no pressure on it, lets him get his fingers curled around the blade of her forearm.

                This is the closest she’s ever been to him. His hair smells clean and faintly herbal, and she can feel his heart beating, faster than she’d like.

                He takes a deep breath, and then another. She can feel him relaxing into her.

                “It’s alright,” she tells him. She hasn’t wanted to comfort anyone in years and years, but she understands the theory. He makes a quiet, choked noise, like he’s trying to laugh and clear his throat at the same time. She leans into him, for just a second, makes sure to keep the arm around his throat loose and unthreatening. He leans back against her, and his weight is an unfamiliar thing, but not unwelcome.

                She stands, quickly, fists a hand in his shirt and pulls him to his feet. “Now,” she says, “watch. I’ll do it one more time, and then you’re doing it to me.”

                “Okay,” he says. He’s still nervous. He will be, she imagines, for a while. But they have time.

 

 

 

                When Barnes finally comes to her for training, he treats it like some kind of punishment. He lets her hit him, harder than he should, more often than he needs to. He leaves openings on purpose, and she takes them, hurts him, because she keeps hoping that, eventually, they will pass whatever threshold he has set.

                Two weeks in, she tells him that they should stop. “You aren’t learning,” she says. She allows it to sound like an accusation. “And neither am I.”

                They could learn a great deal from each other. They already have, in that past life neither one of them seems eager to acknowledge.

                “I’m sorry,” Barnes says. He means it; she can see it in his eyes. His sad eyes, and his downturned mouth, and the way he’s standing with his shoulders straight and his chin lifted, like he’s braced for another hit. “For my role in what happened to you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

                It stings and aches, not unlike frozen skin coming back from frostbite. It’s an odd sensation. She thinks she hasn’t felt it in some time, and she wonders what it is. Regret, maybe. Or guilt. Not shame.

                “You never hurt me more than you needed to,” she says.

                He hadn’t. The training had always been effective. He _had_ hurt her, sometimes. Of course he had. He was training her to fight. But she was younger then, and smaller. He could’ve broken her to pieces, and he never had. He’d hurt her enough to underscore the lesson, to make her faster and stronger and crueler, but he had never gone any further than that.

                It does not seem to comfort him. It seems, somehow, to destroy him.

                “Зимний Солдат,” she says, “it was the Red Room. By those standards, you were practically kind.”

                “I’m sorry,” he says, again. It is a useless thing, and it does not seem to bring him any comfort. She doesn’t understand why he keeps saying it. “And that’s not who I am anymore.”

                Agent Barnes is not the Winter Soldier. She knows that. She has seen the way he smiles at Jason, the way he looks after Barton. She has watched the careful way he navigates crowded hallways, how he maneuvers himself to hide the weapon patched into his shoulder socket. 

                “If that man is not who you are,” she says, “then why are you offering me an apology on his behalf? What right do you have to that?”

                He hesitates. He doesn’t like the question, but she knew he wouldn’t when she asked. It is easier, she knows, to lean into old hurts, because there is always comfort in familiarity, no matter if it’s poison.

                “I was in there.” He says. “Some part of me. _Most_ of me. I was there. I should have--”

                “Whatever you think you did to me, it wasn’t so bad.” She smiles. It’s small, but it’s genuine. She’s relearning how to smile without using it to gain some kind of advantage. Mostly, she’s been practicing on Clint. “You were one of my favorite instructors.”

                He breathes out hard. He’s stopped looking at her. “That isn’t comforting.”

                “Then make it up to me,” she tells him. She has no patience for this. “I’m not in the Red Room anymore, and you’re not the Winter Soldier. You found your way out first.”

                She stops short of asking him for help. Whatever he thinks he owes her, he doesn’t owe her that. The Winter Soldier may owe her a debt, but Bucky Barnes has never hurt her.

                She _is_ the Black Widow; everything she did, she did with her own hands and mind. But Bucky Barnes is not the Winter Soldier. She was a killer, and he was a knife. Their sins are not the same.

                He gives her a quiet, searching look. “It’s better here,” he tells her. “You can be better here.”

                It reminds her of Clint. _There was good in me, and he found it. I think he can find it in you._

                “You can do good,” he says, slowly, “without being good.”

                It sounds like something he’s still convincing himself of. But it fits in a way that Clint’s idea never has. Inside her, there is nothing. Scratch the surface of Clint, and good overflows in every direction, but Coulson could look inside her for years without finding a single scrap of it. There is no good inside her for him to find. She was hollowed out years ago.

                “Show me,” she says.

                She has no right to ask. But she thinks no one would have looked at the Winter Solider and thought he had any right to what Bucky Barnes has now. No one would have granted him this kind of life, where he has freedom and choice, Jason at his side and the team behind them, the kind of kills he can tell people about, the kind of work he can find some pride in.

                She is the Black Widow. But the Black Widow can be anything. She sees no reason why she can’t be this, not if someone will show her how.

                “Yeah,” Barnes says. He looks conflicted. She supposes that’s his right; she can see how he would be hesitant to take on this role again, when he so clearly regrets playing it before. “Okay.”

 

 

 

                The first time she meets Tony Stark, she punches him in the face. She imagines that’s not unusual.

                “Hey,” he says, with a bright, blinding grin. He’s waiting for her in the gym. “Doing well? Been awhile.”

                She knows who he is. He’s Tony Stark, heir to the Stark fortune and the Stark genius. He’s been building weapons for almost as long as she’s been one. He has a dead father and a living mother, and he has the Winter Soldier to thank for one and Jason to thank for the other. He is, she suspects, the engineer that Coulson will never mention by name and the civilian that is alluded to occasionally by the others.

                She remembers him, too. He was there, the night she stole Jason. He shot one Hydra agent in the head and nearly got himself killed, trying to take Jason back from her.

                The way he’s looking at her suggests that he remembers her, too.

                “You don’t work for SHIELD,” she says. She stretches, loosens the muscles that want to stiffen in response to the suspicion in his eyes.

                He has every right to hate her. She knows what they did to Jason.

                “I don’t work for anyone,” Stark tells her. He seems proud of that. For Natasha, it is a completely foreign concept.

                “Am I supposed to teach you something?” She asks, curiously. “You don’t seem like you have the temperament for instruction.”

                He laughs. He has an interesting laugh. It has hints of teeth. “I had Phil to set this up,” he says, gesturing between the two of them. Natasha bristles, a little, at the casual, almost disrespectful way he says _Phil_. “Jason and Bucky, they’ve been teaching me, but they don’t hit hard enough. They care, you know? I feel like that won’t be a problem with you.”

                He bleeds secrets. He bleeds _everything_ , everywhere.

                She’s learned more from him in two minutes than she learned from any of the others in two months.

                She throws the punch. It hits, hard enough that she knows it’ll leave a bruise. It doesn’t dim the wattage of his smile.

                She didn’t need him to tell her that Jason and Bucky care about him. She can tell from the way he takes the punch, on the blade of his jaw instead of the soft, giving flesh of his mouth. They may not hit him hard enough for his liking, but they’ve still taught him how to take a hit.

                When she fights Stark, she can see them, Bucky and Jason, all over him. She can almost see their hands on him, guiding him, turning him, showing him how to take a punch and how to throw one.

                He’s right, though. They haven’t trained him into a decent pain tolerance. She does her best to remedy that, for their sake.

                “Breathe,” she tells him, once. She’s hurting him. She’s hurting him a _lot_. Pressure points, and joints bent the wrong direction, the kind of thing that doesn’t leave too many worrisome bruises. Neither one of them wants to upset Jason, or Bucky. They’re both careful about it.

                “Fuck you,” he snarls back at her, tries to squirm out of the hold.

                “Can’t always get away,” she tells him. Her arm is just loose enough around his throat for him to breathe, if he stops fighting. “Sometimes you have to wait it out.”

                “ _Fuck you_ ,” he says, again, but he stops fighting. He breathes. It’s a wet sound.

                “You’re their weakest point.” He is, just like Clint is Coulson’s. “So make yourself strong. Breathe through it. It’s just nerves firing. It’s just meat.”

                He likes his science. She’s been learning to meet her students halfway, to frame things in ways that makes sense to them. It’s hardest with Stark, but they’ve built a bridge of rationality that she can sometimes find him on, if he’s not too angry or too distracted.

                “Go to hell,” he tells her. She doesn’t mind it when he talks. He’s more careful about what he says than she originally believed. “I’m not weak.”

                “That isn’t what I said.” He is the weakest one, undoubtedly, but he’s surrounded himself with strength, and he holds his own, in the ways that he can. “You are _their_ weakest point. You know that. It’s why you wanted my help.”

                He breathes, and goes still. She waits. A few seconds later, he finds the opening and uses it, flips them like he’s meant to. He pulls away instead of pressing forward, gets free instead of trying to crush her windpipe.

                He’s not a killer. She can’t make him one. Not in the gentle, well-monitored safety of a SHIELD gym.

                “I’m not their only weak point.” He’s catching his breath with his back to her, rubbing at his face where she can’t see. She doesn’t know why he thinks he needs to hide from her. She knows exactly what it feels like; she wouldn’t know how to do these things to him if they hadn’t been done to her.

                He isn’t wrong. “You’re the one I can fix.”

                He takes another deep breath. When he turns to look at her, he’s smiling again. He smiles more than anyone she knows, but very few of those smiles seem real. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” he tells her. “I figured you’d half-ass it, like they do. Thought you wouldn’t want to piss them off.”

                That certainly would have been the wiser course of action. “If you’d prefer,” she says, “we can do things that way.”

                “No,” he says, with a sharp shake of his head. “It’s great that they’re protective. But they’re not always around.”

                “They’d come back.” She knows that. She knew it even before she started to learn that, underneath all his bluster, there’s something valuable and interesting in Stark, something even she would feel obligated to save, if it somehow became her responsibility to do so. “They’d find you.”

                “Yeah,” he says, with the easy confidence of a man who trusts in his value, trusts in the fact that others know that value. “So it’s your job to make sure I’m still there when they show up.”

                “I don’t like it.” It’s a strange thing, voicing a preference, especially when no one’s asked. That’s another thing she’s been practicing. Mostly, she follows Jason’s example. “I know your opinion of me. You have your right to it. But, whatever you think, I don’t actually enjoy hurting you.”

                He laughs at her. He laughs at her a lot, but not like this. There’s another smile, small and begrudging. Genuine. “I know,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I don’t actually enjoy you hurting me, either.”

                There’s a careful moment between them. She hurt all of them, before. She knows that. Tony’s the only one who has really made her work for his forgiveness, and that might be the reason she feels like his is the only one she can accept.

                 “Then stop making it so easy,” she says, with a smile of her own.

                He laughs again. She can see, in the brightness of his laughter and the flash of his eyes, in the careless, casual, hopelessly civilian way he carries himself, exactly what Bucky and Jason see in him. She knows why they are so gentle with him.

                She isn’t gentle. She knows that you don’t get to keep the things you won’t fight for, and the people who don’t learn to fight for themselves don’t get to keep anything at all.

 

 

 

                Maria brings him the report, which is how Phil knows she’s read it. She walks in, a quarter after 3:00pm, with the file in one hand and Fury’s emergency flask in the other, which is how he knows it’s bad.

                “Does Fury know that’s missing?” Phil asks, nodding at the flask as she hands him the file.

                She gives him a razor-thin smile of encouragement and then unscrews the cap. “He gave it to me,” she says.

                “Huh.” Coulson stares at the folder and then takes a steadying breath. Whatever it is, he knows he’s seen worse. That thought is never as comforting as it should be.

                “C’mon, Coulson,” she says, “like a Band-Aid.” She reaches over and flips the folder open in his hands.

                Coulson stares at the photocopied birth certificate for a moment and then turns to the next page for the English translation.

                “Oh,” he says. He laughs a little and then drops the folder on his desk, holds his hand out to take the flask Maria passes his way.

 

 

 

                “Sixteen’s not _that_ young,” Jason says, trying to get the look off Bucky’s face. “I was dead at sixteen.”

                “Wow,” Tony says. “You’re so shitty at this it’s like you’re actively _trying_ to make it worse.”

                “And Russia, I mean,” Jason gestures, a little helplessly. “Russian sixteen is American sixty. She’s an old woman, Buck. She’s older than you. Metaphorically.”

                Tony is staring at him, open-mouthed. “You took that Cold War propaganda a little too much to heart.”

                “You want me to call Bruce?” Jason asks. “Figure out that whole weird, ward-status bullshit he pulled? Is that what Coulson needs?”

                “I thought she was small,” Bucky says, quietly. “The memories—they’re still not that clear. But I remember she was small.”

                “Jesus,” Jason says, with feeling. No wonder Bucky gets twitchy about little Tim.

                “She can’t stay at SHIELD,” Tony says. “She’s a kid. This is fucked up.”

                “She’s not a kid,” Jason says. “Come on. She kicks your ass three days a week.”

                “I’ve seen the bruises she leaves on you, asshole,” Tony says. “I’m not ashamed to admit a teenage girl beat me up. I’d be pretty ashamed to admit I left a teenage girl in the custody of a fucking shadow agency with a vested interest in graduating her right into agent status as soon as she turns eighteen.”

                “So you want to throw her out?” Jason says, incredulous. “She’s safe at SHIELD. If we put her on the streets--”

                “Who’s fucking putting her on the _streets_?” Tony says, throwing his hands up. “She shouldn’t be locked up. She’s a _minor_. She’s practically in solitary confinement for twelve hours a day. You think that’s gonna help her? You think you aren’t fucking her up even more?”

                “We could take her,” Bucky says. He’s still deeper in his own head than Jason likes. He’s got that sad, trouble frown that means he’ll be thinking about Hydra for days. “She could stay here, like Clint stays with Coulson.”

                “Oh, yeah, Fury’s gonna fucking love that,” Jason says. “We’re gone half the year, Buck. Where’s she gonna go when we’re on a mission? Back to SHIELD? Or-- hey, Tony, wanna bring our pet brainwashed child assassin home to meet your mom?”

                “Oh, fuck off,” Tony says. “I brought _you_ home to meet my mother, didn’t I?”

                “Hey,” Jason says. “I’m a Goddamn delight.” Jason’s also never murdered any children or innocent civilians, but Jason doesn’t want to bring that up when Bucky’s in the room, reliving Hydra’s highlights from hell.

                “I’m just saying,” Jason says, when the conversation stalls, “that her age doesn’t change what she’s done, or what she is. I know she’s getting better. I know we’re all hoping that maybe this doesn’t end with her fucking us over and us having to put her down. But it’s still very likely that we will.”

                Tony sets his jaw and glares at him, and Jason really wishes he didn’t find that so attractive, because he feels like the next thing that comes out Tony’s mouth is going to be pretty shitty.

                “SHIELD’s been holding an underage girl,” Tony says, “without access to legal counsel, for months. They’ve filed no charges, alerted no authorities or guardians, and they’ve spent that time alternating between interrogating her and making her fight people.”

                “Are you honestly threatening to sue SHIELD?” Jason says. “Are you fucking serious? She’s been fighting _you_.”

                “Her age doesn’t change what she’s done,” Tony says, throwing his words back in his face, “but it should sure as hell change how we treat her.”

                “That’s a real sweet sentiment,” Jason says. “And if we take her out of a secured facility and she fucking disappears on us, I’m sure everyone she murders afterwards will be very comforted to know that, sure, they may be fucking _dead_ , but at least we didn’t illegally imprison a minor.”

                Tony narrows his eyes. Jason narrows his right back.

                “We’ll ask her,” Bucky says. “For Christ’s sake, Jason, they used to chain the girls up at night. I remember the bruises on their wrists from the handcuffs. I don’t want to be that anymore. If she wants out, we’ll find a way to get her out.”

                Jason can see a million ways for this to go wrong. But there’s no way, standing there, staring at Bucky’s face, that he could ever argue the point.

                If she fucks them over, he’s going to be the one to handle it. Not Clint, who’s been championing her since she walked into his crosshairs. Not Bucky, who’s already carrying so much unearned guilt. And sure as hell not Tony, who’s still fucked up about that one Hydra agent he shot to death two years ago.

                It’ll be him, with Coulson in his ear, giving the order.

                Jason doesn’t _want_ to kill her. And, as long as she stays locked up at SHIELD, she won’t have the opportunity to give him a reason to.

                “Fine,” he says. Bucky needs this. He’d do worse things for Bucky. “But I get to be in the room when Tony threatens to sue Fury.”

 

 

 

                Coulson spends half an hour explaining her options to her. She makes her decision five minutes in, but it seems rude to interrupt. “Barton,” she says, when Coulson finally seems like he’s done talking. “And you.”

                Coulson gives her a weighted look and then taps his pen against the pile of documents on his desk. “You should review your options,” he says. “Bucky and Jason have plenty of room, and they’ve said they wouldn’t mind. Tony thinks you shouldn’t be in SHIELD’s care at all anymore. Fury doesn’t agree, but, between the two of us, Stark has better lawyers.”

                “You and Barton,” she repeats. “That’s my decision.”

                Sixteen is years younger than she feels, but she’s not surprised by it. She doesn’t feel anything at all about how young she is. Except she’s a little surprised that, of all things, it’s her age that gets her out of her SHIELD cell. It’s certainly never protected her before.

 

 

 

                The day she leaves SHIELD, Tony and Bucky show up to take her shopping. “It’s your liberation day,” Stark tells her, pushing his obnoxious sunglasses down his nose so he can look her in the eyes. “C’mon, let’s buy something tacky and red that’ll piss Coulson off. You want a Russian flag? How about a really giant Russian flag?”

                “You can ignore him,” Barnes says, with a quiet smile.

                “Can _anyone_ ignore him?” She counters, watching Tony saunter through SHIELD’s hallways, clearing agents out of his path with the power of arrogance alone.

                “Haven’t met anyone yet.” Bucky shrugs, but his smile is fond. “If you figure it out, though, let me know.”

                They go to Medical first, where Stark fusses endlessly while the composed doctor who handled her intake swabs a spot on her arm. “I’m not sorry,” Tony says, as the doctor makes a neat incision. “This is a small, tiny, _minuscule_ revenge for everything you’ve ever done to me.”

                “Stark,” Natasha says, calmly, “it doesn’t even hurt.”

                “You missed the numbing shot,” Bucky tells him. “There was a needle involved. You probably blacked it out.”

                “And don’t you go fishing around for it, later,” Tony says. “It moves. Also, it’ll throw a fit if it gets damaged.”

                Natasha’s not sure it’ll actually move, but she’ll heed the warning anyway. “I read the release,” she reminds him. “I signed it.”

                “So don’t run,” Tony says. He gives her a quick, sideways look. “If you do, this will tell us where to find you.”

                “I know how a tracking chip works.” It’ll be hard for him, she realizes. If he’s complicit in her death. He knows that, and he made the chip anyway.

                He’s brave, even if he doesn’t show it often. They’re all brave. They’re more than she deserves. Selfishly, she still wants to keep them.

                Afterward, Stark’s driver ferries them around while Stark throws money at her until he seems to feel better about the tracking chip. Natasha lets him do it. She doesn’t need the clothes he buys, or the curtains, or the endless array of things he keeps parading in front of her, but she won’t mind having them. And it seems to soothe him, somehow.

                “Stark,” she says, when the sun is setting and the phone Coulson gave her lights up with a message, reminding her she has a 7:00pm curfew. “I need to get to Coulson’s place.”

                “Right,” Stark says. He’s in the backseat with her, and Bucky’s in the front, by the driver. “Let’s get you home.”

                _Home_ , she thinks. It has an odd resonance.

                Natasha doesn’t have a home. She has a trunk full of material goods purchased with Tony Stark’s money. She has orders to be in Coulson’s house before seven, and a tracking chip in her arm that is constantly monitoring her location and reporting it to SHIELD. She has a bag at her feet, filled with SHIELD-issued clothes, enough food to last a few days, and the paper bird Clint gave her, when they met.

                None of it adds up to a home. She doesn’t have a home.

                She has Tony, and Bucky, and Jason. She has Coulson, and she has Clint. If she’s careful, if she’s lucky, she might, eventually, have a team. And that, she thinks, is just as good.


	5. Chapter 5

                Afterwards, when Bucky has hung the curtains in her room, and Tony has begrudgingly admitted the security system is _reasonably functional_ , and Barton has pushed seconds of Coulson’s pasta onto her plate, and Coulson has explained all of the house’s linen cabinets and hidden weapon caches, Natasha finds herself alone in her bedroom.

                She feels exposed, in this house. In this room. There is too much unmonitored space.

                Earlier, while there was still light outside, she had stared out of her window, at the wide expanse of slightly-feral yard, and counted the half-dozen different ways she could sneak up to this window, in the night, without setting off the motion-sensitive lights.

                Tony had checked the sensors around the window. He’d assured her that no one was going to break in without setting off the alarm.

                As she pulls the curtains shut, checking to make sure the heavy fabric covers every inch of glass, she lets herself acknowledges what she didn’t say to Tony. _You don’t have to break in to send a bullet through a window. And no alarm in the world can wake the dead._

It is silly, and irrational. She is safe here. If Coulson and Barton are safe, then so is she.

                Phil Coulson is a very competent man, and he cares about Barton, who cares about her. She is safe. Everything is fine.

                But after months of sleeping surrounded by armed agents and fortified walls and razorwire-topped fences, she feels vulnerable standing behind blackout curtains Tony had purchased for her at a civilian store just hours ago.

                She sits, cross-legged, on the edge of her bed. She thinks about reading the book Clint brought her, or maybe going through the magazine she’d picked up, intrigued by the cover, struck by the idea of very nearly sharing an age – _Seventeen_ – and sharing absolutely none of the concerns.

                “Alright?” Barton asks, from her doorway.

                It’s nearly midnight, and he’s dressed for bed in sweatpants and a ragged t-shirt. There is a smudge of toothpaste drying on his chin. He looks sleepy and relaxed in a way she’s never seen before.

                _Barton knows he’s safe_ , she tells herself. _Barton is safe here, and so are you._

                “Alright,” she says. She’s been making an effort not to lie to him, but she doesn’t have the words for what she is.

Everything is fine. She has no reason to be worried.

                She is safe.

                “Freaking out a little bit?” Barton says, like it’s nothing to be ashamed of. But Natasha knows hitting this level of anxiety over no threat at all is worse than embarrassing; it’s a failure. She needs to be able to trust her instincts. She can’t do that if they develop the habit of sending out false positives.

                “No,” she says, and that _is_ a lie. She presses her lips together and shakes her head. “It’s a lot of space,” she says, after a beat.

                “Yeah, I get that.” He looks around her room for a second and then smiles, sweet and encouraging in that way he keeps giving her, even though she’s never done a single thing to earn it. “I can watch the door for you, like old times.”

                She frowns at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

                “Who’s being ridiculous? Coulson’s got nice carpet. It’s fine. Trust me, I’ve slept in _way_ worse places than Coulson’s hallway.” He gestures over his shoulder. “Just let me get a pillow.”

                “Just sleep here,” she says, and jerks her chin toward the bed. Barton goes still, and his face falls, and she hates that look on his face, like he thinks he has to feel guilty over something she’s done. “Barton,” she says, “it’s just a bed.”

                “Nat,” he says, carefully. He’s never careful with her, not like this. Not like she’s something he has to watch himself around. “That’s not--”

                “We’re a team,” she tells him, a little more fiercely than the conversation probably calls for. She doesn’t know how to ask for this. She has no right to it, not really, but, at the same time, it feels like something she has _some_ claim over. Something given to her, even if she doesn’t deserve it. “You watch the door. I watch the window.”

                He looks at her for a long moment, uncertain. He sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, biting down as he thinks it over, and she needs to coach him out of that tell, but, for now, she’ll use it.

                “We’re a team,” he agrees. He takes a small, hesitant step into her room. “We’re a team, Nat, and that’s it. We’re not gonnna--”

                “If I were trying to seduce you,” she says, “I’d wear a suit and ask you about your mission reports.”

                “Jesus, Nat,” he says, kicking the door shut behind him and shooting a nervous look over his shoulder, like he thinks Coulson’s going to appear at the mere whisper of mission reports. “People can _hear you_.”

                 Natasha rolls her eyes, but doesn’t antagonize him further. He’s standing a single step into her room, coltish and uncertain, ready to bolt, and she knows that trying to drag him in is the best way to make him run, so she turns her back on him, gives him the room he needs to reel himself in.

                “If there’s anything you need from your room,” she says, pulling down the heavy comforter and rearranging the pillows from decorative to functional, “grab it now. Because I plan to be asleep within the next ten minutes.”

                “Hell, Nat, I don’t know,” he says, mock-thoughtfully. “I’m not sure this bed is gonna hold me, you, and all my teddy bears.”

                Natasha grabs clothes from her dresser and heads for her attached bathroom. “Then round up your top ten favorites, Barton,” she says. “We’ll make it work.”

                She brushes her teeth, washes her face, and then changes in the bathroom, to avoid unsettling Barton’s sometimes surprisingly delicate sensibilities. She’d picked pajamas that matched his own – a t-shirt and long pants – for the same reason. He still seems skittish when she crawls in next to him, puts himself within an inch of falling off his side of the bed. She lets him. She doesn’t care how much space he needs, so long as he stays.

                She thinks it’s sweet, that he’s so obviously uncomfortable and still so determined to stay. He has always been sweeter to her than she can explain. She almost tells him, as she lies there, that his paper bird is tucked beneath the pillow he’s using.

                But, however free these people are with their weaknesses, she still can’t find her way to mimicking that behavior back at them.

                She rolls over so her back is to his. She watches the window; he watches the door. She can hear him breathing, and she knows all of her previous concerns, however irrational, are not answered by Barton’s presence. If someone fired through that window and hit her, she would still die.

                But he’d be with her, and so, somehow, that soothes the anxious, odds-calculating chatter of her mind.

                They are SHIELD’s assets, in Phil Coulson’s house. They are safe. No one is getting to Barton from that window, and no one is getting to her through that door.

                _It’s alright_ , she tells herself. _It’s alright_.

 

 

 

                In the morning, she wakes to find she has wrapped herself around Barton. She’s burrowed right into him, face pressed between his shoulder blades, arm around his waist. She wakes up because he shifts, just starting to climb back to consciousness, and she has a moment where she could put space between them, disavow the greedy inclinations of her unconscious mind, but she holds her position, pulls him closer.

                “I knew it,” Barton mumbles, voice dropped low, still hazy from sleep. “I knew you were gonna be a cuddler. ‘s all that repression.”

                “Don’t flatter yourself,” she tells him. “I was just trying to find one of those fourteen teddy bears.”

                “Yeah,” Barton says, with a snort. “Sure. The old ‘don’t mind me, just looking for a stuffed animal’ excuse.”

                She smiles and rolls away from him, stares up at the ceiling. She feels sluggish from sleep, almost drugged with it. She can’t remember the last time she slept that deep without some kind of chemical assistance.

                She has no right to this. She doesn’t. But she’s not sure how she would find her footing, if it were taken away from her.

                “In the Red Room,” she says, “they would watch us. Constantly. We were monitored for all sorts of things, but they paid special attention to any friendships we made.” She takes a breath, and it doesn’t catch in her throat; she’s too well-trained for that. But some small, faded part of her wants to slip free, show pain, as if showing pain has ever led to any positive outcomes.

                “They made us fight,” she says. “The last friend I had, they put us together, with a knife between us. And it was one of us, or it was both of us. We were years into our training at that point. We weren’t girls anymore. So, we fought.”

                “Nat,” Clint says, going up on one elbow, staring over at her. She can see him in her peripheral vision, but she can’t bring herself to look directly at him. Not yet. “Nat, that’s--”

                “She let me,” Nat says. “She let me win. I’d done it on purpose, I think. That’s who I am. I made her love me more than I loved her, because I knew. I knew the pattern. I knew what they were going to do. And I wanted to win. So I did.”

                “Shit,” Clint says, sitting up all the way. He’s rumpled, blonde hair scattered in all directions, sleep marks on his face. He’s so delicate. She could kill him, right now. She could. He’d let her. She knows he would.

                “I don’t know how to be anything other than what they made me,” she tells him. She looks at him, finally, so he’ll understand.

                He doesn’t, or maybe he sees something she doesn’t mean to show. His hands wrap around her, pull her up, and he’s holding her, when he should be leaving. He should never, ever let her get this close to so many useful arteries.

                She still thinks about how she’ll kill him, how she’ll kill all of them, if she has to. She can’t stop it. She can’t make herself not think about it.

                “You do, Nat,” he says. “You know. You’re learning. It’ll get better, I promise.”

                She tucks her face into his neck and lets her fingers wind tight in the soft fabric of his shirt. She doesn’t cry; she’s not a child.

                _We’re a team_ , she thinks.

                She didn’t earn this. She’s not sure there’s a way to earn a person like Barton, or Coulson. Or Barnes, Jason, and Tony. They aren’t tradeable goods; they’re gifts. And she can see how, with gifts, it’s not so much a matter of earning them as it is honoring them.

                “If anyone ever makes us fight,” she tells him, as earnestly as she knows how, “I’ll kill them.”

                He runs a steady, reassuring hand down her back. “I’ll play dead,” he says. “Shouldn’t be too hard, since you’ll knock me the hell out in five seconds flat.”

                “Ten seconds,” she says. “You’re learning.”

                He laughs. She can feel it, reverberating in her chest. She understands now why they were made to fight, why friendship was such a threat to the Red Room’s control that they would waste their own trainees, pitting them against each other.

                She knows now why that girl let herself die.

                Loyalty, she understands, is a dangerous thing.

 

 

 

                The information Natasha gives to the intel teams is verified, when it can be, analyzed, and sent out to any number of teams in any number of countries. Arrests are made, shipments are stolen, and former associates are quietly murdered. The information she gives is classified, and the direct transcriptions of her sessions are locked down to the point that even Phil sometimes has to wait weeks for them to be released.

                Phil has worked for SHIELD for over ten years. He was a Ranger before that. He knows it’s not a gentle world. Still, some of the transcriptions are hard to read.

                “SHIELD could use this man,” Phil tells Bucky once, when Bucky and Jason are packing for their next mission. Jason’s in the other room, on the phone with someone from Gotham, and Bucky’s eyes narrow a little as he tries to read Phil’s face.

                “I assume that’s why we have capture orders,” Bucky says, testing the waters.

                “Yes,” Phil agrees, “those are the orders. Weak temperament, allegedly. He’s led a very…indulgent life. The thinking is, if we capture him, it won’t take much pressure to get him to talk.”

                “Okay,” Bucky says. “Indulgent.”

                The vices this man has seen fit to indulge are offensive enough that Phil redacted them from the file before he gave it to his team. Jason’s rage is not subtle. Bucky’s, on the other hand, has the useful habit of going completely silent once it passes a certain threshold.

                “They want to bring him back here,” Phil says. Bucky’s watching him, eyes moving from Phil’s face to the way Phil’s standing, arms crossed over his chest, tense. “We’ll have to be careful to coordinate moving him. It might be disruptive, if Natasha saw him. Not helpful, for us. Or her.”

                Bucky blinks slowly and glances over Phil’s shoulder, toward the living room, where they can both hear Jason yelling something borderline unintelligible about floral toxins and weaponized pheromones.

                “Right,” Bucky says, when his eyes settle back on Phil. “I’ll keep you updated.”

                “Excellent,” Phil says. “Stay safe.”

                The man dies in transport. He uses a smuggled knife to cut himself out of his restraints and tries to attack one of the transport agents, who shoots him to death in the back of the SHIELD van.

                “Can’t believe you missed a knife, Buck,” Jason says, at the briefing afterward. His smile is sharp enough that Phil honestly can’t tell how much he’s already figured out. “SHIELD’s making you sloppy.”

                “Guess so,” Bucky says, pulling his expression into a decent attempt at contrition.

                “Don’t worry,” Jason says, with a smirk. “We can practice pat downs when we get home.”

                “Okay,” Phil says, pointing at his office door, “that’s enough. You’re done. Go home.”

                “Sure,” Jason says, curling a hand around Bucky’s wrist and yanking him to his feet. “Let us know if you need anyone else picked up, Phil.” He looks over his shoulder as he leaves, and that smile is back, crooked and knowing. “To be fair, he had a pulse when we put him in that van.”

                No one would look at his team and think of them as angels or saints. Phil knows that. Phil knows what his team is, what SHIELD is. What Natasha is. But there are certain devils he can’t make deals with, not if he wants to look himself in the eye in the morning and tell himself that he’s doing good work.

                When Nick calls him in, Phil repeats his orders to Barnes.

                “That it?” Nick asks. He looks like he is about ready to throw Phil and his entire team out of the nearest window, but Phil’s not too worried; he almost always looks like that. “That really all you have to say?”

                “If you have a problem with my orders,” Phil says, “please clarify. We’re not usually a capture team. I’d welcome any advice you have, for future missions.”

                Fury leans back and stares at him, and Phil knows, immediately, that he did exactly what Fury expected him to do.

                “You’re getting attached,” Fury tells him. It sounds like he can’t make up his mind whether he’s amused or concerned.

                “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Phil would’ve had that man killed even if all he had was the file and no personal knowledge of one of the people mentioned in it. He didn’t do it because it was Natasha. He would’ve done it for anyone.

                “If you weren’t getting attached,” Nick says, “you would’ve waited to kill him until after we had the information.”

                Phil blinks. That, he thinks, is probably fair.

                “If you didn’t want him dead before that,” Phil says, “you would’ve given that mission to some other team.”

                Nick shrugs, like this whole thing was a matter of casual interest for him. “I just want you to think about this,” Fury tells him, as he signs the report, confirming Phil’s version of events. “I want you to be aware of her influence on you.”

                Phil doesn’t say anything. He thinks anyone who’s met Natasha, who’s watched the way she checks every exit and monitors every threat, who has read hundreds of hours’ worth of interrogation transcripts, who knows she keeps the paper bird Clint gave her tucked under her pillow, would be influenced.

                He’s not ashamed of it, even if he knows that she’s probably deliberately nurtured this protectiveness.

                “You want anyone else killed,” Phil says, “let us know.”

 

 

 

                Natasha tells Phil that she has no interest in field work, but that, of course, is a lie. She’s _interested_. She’s curious, and she is, to some degree, bored with the safety and stability of training SHIELD personnel in a SHIELD gym. But, despite her interest, she doesn’t want to go back out into the world, with her knives and guns, and add more blood to the streets.

                At first, she knows when the others go on missions because they suddenly disappear from her lessons. As the months go by, they begin to warn her, both directly and indirectly, before they leave.

                They all have tells. Jason and Clint have a habit of eating more before missions; Jason likes hamburgers and steaks, and Clint likes anything, everything, will eat and eat like he’s prepping for a seven day fast. If Bucky’s doing recon, he cuts his meals in half; if he’s going out to kill, he’ll skip meals entirely. Coulson’s eating habits remain steady, but he’ll switch over to a different time zone, drink coffee or take sleeping pills, adjust to wherever his team is going, even if he stays state-side.

                She never asks when they’ll come back, but, if she asks if they’re leaving, they will, sometimes, tell her. Jason is the first.

                “You’re going?” Natasha asks, one day, before they train. She’s sizing him up, trying to decide if she should pull her punches, let him go off to fight without any new bruises.

                He grins at her. “Yeah,” he says, “gone for a week and a half, probably. If I’m not back in two, come save me.”

                “Save yourself,” Nat says, adjusting her gloves as an excuse to duck her head, let her hair hide whatever might be on her face. “I’m retired from public life.”

                “Too bad, Red,” Jason says, smirking. “We’d have a hell of a time.”

                Bucky will tell her, sometimes, if he can. He is more precise than Jason, less naturally evasive. But he never once invites her along. Coulson tells her that he’s going, but he doesn’t give any dates, and so neither does Clint, technically.

                “We’ve got a mission,” Clint tells her, the first time they all leave. “All four of us. Maria’s gonna stay with you, while we’re gone.”

                Maria Hill has stayed over in the past, when Coulson’s on a mission with Jason and Bucky. Natasha had been unsettled the first night, disturbed by the unfamiliar presence in the territory she shares with Clint and Coulson, but Clint had been happy to see her. The two of them had stayed up late, critiquing the fight scenes in action movies Coulson seems to have acquired solely for this purpose, eating pizza and drinking beer and trying to drag Natasha into their unflattering evaluation of Hollywood physics.

                “Alright,” Natasha says. She doesn’t mind Maria.

                “Can’t tell you how long we’ll be gone,” Clint says, with a shrug. He drops a flock of paper birds on her dresser and grins at the searching look she gives him. “These are for you,” he tells her. “You should open them up, while I’m gone. Maybe one a day.”

                “Alright,” Natasha says, again. “Good luck.”

                “Thanks,” he says. “Don’t let Maria talk shit about _Die Hard_.”

                She can’t bring herself to hug him before he goes, although he hovers closer to her than usual, looking hopeful. She can’t do it. It feels like bad luck, like a goodbye.

                She opens the first bird on the day he leaves, and there’s a scrawled note inside: _cash in the microwave, order pizza, Hill likes olives_. Every day she opens one to find more notes ( _feed Phil’s fish, it’s definitely alive_ and _hid a knife in the garage, $10 if you find it_ and _tell Hill you’re going jogging and go pet the neighbor’s dogs_ ) and stick-figure drawings of their teammates and, once, Tony Stark’s cellphone number with a dare to call, pretending to be Jason’s arresting officer.

                The day she runs out of birds, the team comes back.

                And, even though she couldn’t bring herself to hug him when he left, she keeps catching herself finding excuses to touch Clint, and the others, when they come back.

                “I can tell you missed us,” Jason tells her, later, when they’ve taken over a booth at a diner Clint loves because they sell pancakes the size of his head, “because that’s the third time you’ve kicked me under the table, and not once did you kick hard enough to bruise.”

                “Can’t throw the other agents around like I do with you three,” she tells him. “They file complaints.”

                “You’re a sweetheart, Red,” Jason tells her, pointing the prongs of his fork at her. “Don’t try to bullshit me. I know you.”

                They know her, and she knows them, and that should make them dangerous to each other, but, instead, every shared secret feels like another layer of armor wrapped around them. _A pride_ , she tells herself, _is stronger than any single lion._

But packs and prides have their own weaknesses. All vulnerabilities are shared. Grief is contagious.

                There’s a mission where Natasha runs out of birds, and Clint does not come home. Her whole team is gone, and no one comes back.

                She is uneasy on the first day. By the third, she can’t sleep. Hill keeps stepping out of the house to have hushed conversations in the driveway, and the looks she gives Natasha when she comes back inside are shuttered and grim.

                “Tell me,” Natasha says, on the second day.

                “I can’t,” Maria says. “I’m sorry. You don’t have the clearance for mission updates.”

                “Tell me,” Natasha says, again, on the fifth. “Please.”

                Maria locks her jaw and taps her fingernails against the glass bottle in her hand. She narrows her eyes at the carpet, and says nothing for so long that Natasha thinks she won’t say anything at all. “If there’s a fatality,” Maria tells her, “the status changes. I could tell you.”

                “So, no one’s dead,” Nat says. The valve that’s been slowly closing, choking off the air in her lungs, loosens just enough to take in one deep, steadying breath. “They’re all still alive.”

                “If someone died,” Maria says, “I could tell you.”

                “If you tell me where they are,” Natasha says, “I’ll go get them back.”

                Maria gives her a sharp sideways look and then her face relaxes into a soft, sad smile. “Natasha,” she says, “I can’t do that. Give them time.”

                When her team comes home, Jason shows up in the back of the gym, dirty and bruised, and Natasha dumps the agent she’s been working with on the floor, heedless and too fast. “Jason,” she says, moving quickly across the gym. “You’re late.”

                “Told you to come rescue me,” Jason says, but the curled-up smirk on his face is wrong; there’s worry in his eyes. “Now, listen,” he says, hands up, “he’s fine.”

                “Who’s fine?” Nat asks. “Who is it?”

                “Clint,” Jason says. “He was stationed on a rooftop. The fuckers set the whole building on fire.”

                Natasha swallows. Her brain flicks through a dozen useless thoughts. Clint’s hands, and his smile, and the way he sleeps, curled up. How he always eats before missions, always fills her plate up with more than she’d choose for herself. His perfect aim and his stupid jokes and that kind heart he carries around, out in the open, where anyone could see it and rip it right out of him.

                “He’s in Medical,” Jason says. “Awake for now. You want to see him?”

                “No,” Natasha says, stepping back. The last thing in the world she wants to see right now is Clint Barton. She’s not sure what would happen, if she walked into a sterile hospital room and saw Clint lying there, barely conscious. “I’ve got training,” she explains, gesturing over her shoulder.

                Jason raises his eyebrows at her, and she knows he’s disappointed. She can read it on his face. “Nat,” he says, “he asked for you.”

                “I’ve got training,” she repeats.

                “You wanna know how to be a human, Nat?” Jason says, low and mean. “Wanna know how to have friends? Because this shit is the exact opposite of both.”

                Natasha turns and goes back to the mats. By the time she checks the back of the gym again, Jason is gone.

 

 

 

                Coulson usually works late, the night after a mission. Hill offers to drive her home and stay until he gets there, but Natasha asks for one of the overnight rooms at SHIELD, instead. Hill gives her an exasperated, beleaguered look, but she takes her to one.

                “Get your head right,” Hill advises, as she turns to leave. “Freak out if you have to, but do it on an expedited timeline. Sometimes other people’s needs come first.”

                Natasha has spent all her life serving other people’s needs. Those needs had generally been clear things, often explicit demands. This murky territory is unfamiliar, and she knows how she’s meant to act, how to manipulate the situation so no one will think of her as callous or cruel, but there is no one to enforce that behavior. She can act however she wants to act.

                What she wants is space, and time, and no audience.

                Hours later, she breaks into Medical. She’s careful about it. She picks the shift change, when the personnel will be busy briefing their replacements.

                When she breaks into his room, Clint’s asleep.

                He doesn’t look as bad as she’d feared. His left leg is in a cast, and they have him on an IV drip. His arms are wrapped loosely in bandages from wrist to shoulder, but he must have been very careful with his hands; they are scraped, but not burned.

                There is an empty chair near the bed, and Natasha pushes it as close to the mattress as she can get before settling in. She stares at him for a long time before she slowly reaches out and puts her hand over his.

                He stirs. “Nat?” He asks, when he finally blinks his eyes open. “Hey.”

                “You’re an idiot,” she tells him. “You’re careless, and uncoordinated, and a moron.”

                “Aw,” he says, with a lopsided grin. “You worried, huh?”

                “I worry every time you go out in public without an adult,” she tells him. “Coulson can’t possibly watch three of you at once.”

                “Should come with us sometime,” Clint says, eyes fluttering closed. “Give Phil some backup.”

                Natasha tightens her jaw before she can promise to be there every time, if he needs. She remembers what it was like out there, and she remembers what _she_ was like. And she’s not sure if the version of her that has a team, has people who want her around them, can be reconciled with the version of her who used to be good at that sort of work. 

                Clint’s hand shifts beneath hers, rolls over so it’s palm-up. His fingers wrap through hers, and she holds tight, even after he’s fallen back to sleep.

                “Christ,” the doctor says, when she comes in an hour or so later. She’s so surprised by Natasha that she fumbles her clipboard, barely catches it in time.

                “Morning,” Natasha says, with a nod.

                The doctor stares at her for a long moment and then heaves a deep, heartfelt sigh. “Well,” she says, gathering herself, “this the first time a member of Coulson’s team has snuck _into_ Medical. I suppose that’s better than the other way around.”

                “How’s he doing?” Natasha asks, tipping her head Clint’s direction.

                The doctor hesitates, eyes darting to the file in her hand. “I’m sorry. Do you have clearance for that?”

                “She does,” Coulson says, as he steps into the room. “And, if she doesn’t, I’m not sure either one of us wants to be responsible for telling her no right now. So, how’s he doing?”

                Natasha meets Coulson’s eyes. Unlike the doctor, he doesn’t seem at all surprised to see her. He gives her a small, exhausted smile, and Natasha nods her head and tightens her grip on Clint’s hand.

                She’s always been _interested_ in field work. Curious about it, intrigued by the idea of working with this team, with any permanent team. But this is the first time it’s felt like a need, hooking into her, pulling her along behind them.

 

 

 

                Clint is benched for two months, which he seems to find endlessly frustrating. Coulson lets them set up an archery range in the long stretch of his backyard, and Clint teaches her how to shoot. Tony visits once, with a bow and a set of arrows he’s modified for Clint, and the three of them stay out until sunset, their breath fogging in the air as Clint messes with the explosive arrowheads, tries to hit Natasha’s knives at just the right spot to shatter the blade instead of simply knocking them out of the air.

                “This is fucking precious,” Jason says, when he shows up. “Buck, are you seeing this?”

                “I’m seeing shards of metal all over Coulson’s yard,” Bucky says.

                “Oh, no,” Clint says, “how inconsiderate of us. I guess he’ll just have to let us go back to practicing at SHIELD.”

                “Jesus, kid,” Jason says, “if you think you’re ever gonna win a battle of wills against Phil Coulson, you haven’t been paying attention for the last couple years.”

                “If we practiced at my place,” Tony says, “I could get better data.”

                It sounds, at the time, like a throwaway comment. Tony seems to make a lot of those. Natasha can’t hold it against him; he generates a dozen ideas in the time it takes most people to form one. No matter how efficient his brain is, there’s no way he could follow up on every single idea he has.

                She’s surprised, a few weeks later, when Tony swings by Coulson’s house to invite both of them to California.

                “Well,” he says, hands in his pockets, “neither one of you have missions. And Coulson’s taking Jay and Buck out to Gotham, so.”

                Natasha’s been monitoring that development. Jason has some kind of strained family ties to Gotham, and they have, apparently, invited him home for Christmas.

                The invitation had set off a string of complicated diplomatic negotiations, handled primarily by Coulson and Bucky, while Jason prowled around the perimeter of whatever room they happened to be in and offered increasingly unlikely theories, such as: _He’s dying. He’s got cancer. Oh, fuck, he’s gonna put me in the will, and I’m gonna have to deal with lawyers and **accountants** , _and _He needs a kidney. Buck, he’s gonna spike the eggnog and harvest my fucking kidney_ , and _Someone’s killed him, and made a suit out of his skin, and they’re trying to lure me in, but I’m not fucking **stupid**_.

                Jason and Bucky have plans to be with the Starks for Christmas. But they reach an oddly treaty-like agreement to go to Gotham the week before and spend four days with Jason’s family.

                Natasha has never seen Jason nervous before, but, the day they leave, he’s wound so tight that she almost offers to fight him, right there in Coulson’s living room, and bleed out some of that tension.

                “He’ll be fine,” Bucky says, fondly, when he catches her staring.

                “Of fucking course I’ll be fine,” Jason says, grimly. “Right up until they cut out my Goddamn kidney.”

                “If they take your kidney,” Natasha says, “I’ll help you take it back.”

                Jason points at her with one hand and pulls a flask out of his jacket pocket with the other. “You,” he says, “are the only true friend I have left.”

                “Love you, too,” Bucky says, taking the flask out of his hand. “You can have this back _after_ we land in Gotham.”

                “The only one,” Jason repeats, darkly.

                Coulson loads both of them into his car, puts their bags in the trunk, and waves. Natasha, Clint, Hill, and Tony wave back from the porch, and watch, quietly, as the car pulls away.

                “Hey, Stark,” Cllint says, when the car is finally out of sight, “what’s the over-under on the damage total for this Gotham trip?”

                “I’m not thinking about it,” Tony says, cheerfully. “Because if I think about it, I’m obligated to warn my accountant. Now, load up, kids. There’s champagne chilling in the jet. And some juice boxes for Natasha.”

 

 

 

                When they arrive in California, Tony introduces Natasha to his mother, Maria Stark. She’s lovely. She’s beautiful and graceful and polite, and, underneath all of that, she’s inquisitive, intuitive, and careful. At first, Natasha doesn’t see much of her in Tony, but, over time, she realizes they have the same habit of counterbalancing their affections, offering something with the delicate, off-hand indifference of someone who expects, at least a little, to have it thrown back in their face.

                Natasha wonders if _once bitten, twice shy_ is the Stark family motto, and thinks about the implications of that, at the idea that someone in this family had teeth and used them, while she calls up a set of manners she hasn’t used since she joined SHIELD and plays Maria’s social class back at her.

                “And what do you do for SHIELD?” Maria asks, over dinner on the first night. She is obviously charmed by Natasha, and Natasha might feel guilty about that, but she seems just as charmed by Hill and Clint.

                “Personal trainer,” Tony says, before Natasha can concoct a reasonable lie. “And cultural consultant. She’s Russian.”

                “Are you really?” Maria asks, eyes brightening with that match-strike flare of focus Natasha is used to seeing in Tony. “Your accent is amazing. I had no idea. Do you know Bucky? He spent some time in Russia, too.”

                “Oh, Bucky Barnes,” Natasha says. “Yes, we work together sometimes.”

                She smiles at Maria, and Maria beams back, and Natasha wonders how much she knows, under all those artfully arranged layers of bubbly civility.

                “He’s wonderful,” Maria says. She says it with a touch more force than anything else she’s said. It’s subtle. Natasha wouldn’t have expected anyone at the table to notice, but Tony’s eyes cut to his mother, bright and fond, and Natasha looks away.

                “Yes,” she says. “He is.”

 

 

 

                The guest room Maria gives Clint is smaller than the one she gives Natasha, but Natasha’s room has an oversized window that provides a beautiful view of the sea, so they end up sleeping, curled together, in Clint’s room, which has no windows at all and just the one exit door.

                “She’s gonna think we’re sleeping together,” Clint complains, when Natasha first shows up.

                “We are,” Natasha points out. “Sometimes.”

                “Okay,” Clint says, “you know what I meant. She is gonna think we are sleeping together metaphorically instead of sleeping together literally.”

                “Don’t worry so much about your reputation,” Natasha advises as she takes out her earrings and pulls off her socks. “It’s already terrible. You don’t have much to lose.”

                “I don’t want Tony’s _mom_ to think I’m a creep,” Clint says. He tugs the blankets back for her and then pulls them up again when she slides underneath. “You gotta get out of here before she wakes up.”

                “Oh,” Natasha says, “yeah, _that’ll_ really win her over. She’ll think you’re sleeping with me and ashamed of it. Don’t ever play chess, Barton. Strategy is not your strong suit.”

                The bed is too large and too soft and too comfortable. It smells like expensive laundry detergent. Natasha can’t sleep at all until Clint rolls over in his sleep, leaning into her. He’s familiar, the weight and smell of him, the soft, sleepy sounds he makes.

                They always end up like this, when he comes back from a mission. That first night, and sometimes the second one, she can’t sleep unless she knows he’s near.

                She remembers thinking how sloppy it was of Coulson, to bury his weaknesses in other people, who could fail and fall apart at any moment. _Unwise_ , she’d thought _, to have a weakness you can’t control._

She still clocks ways to hurt them, kill them. She can’t make it stop. She doesn’t want to. Information is information; it isn’t good or bad. These days, instead of keeping those vulnerabilities to herself, she points them out, mercilessly, tries to correct them.

                She can’t control them. She knows she can’t always protect them. She does what she can.

 

 

 

                Tony, she thinks, wants to be betrayed. He probably isn’t aware of it. But if she looks back over the timeline of their relationship, she can see how many chances he’s given her. From the very beginning, he asked for something he doubted she would give, and he set her up to fail him, either by committing too much or not at all. He put a chip in her arm that would have made him complicit in her death, if she ran, and she knows what that would cost him, sensitive as he is, as coddled as he’s been. He never objected to her growing closer to the people he cares about, although she’s hurt them before and is likely to do it again.

                He brought her home to meet his civilian mother, let her sit across the table and talk to a woman who could be destroyed by one of the secrets Natasha knows. At any point, Natasha could tell Maria that Bucky Barnes, the man she’s so fond of, is responsible for her husband’s death. She could rip this family to pieces. She doesn’t.

                Tony takes her and Clint down to a basement level training room on the second day. The whole thing has been designed for the two of them. She knows it immediately; she can tell that Clint does, too. The room would be useless and overwhelming for Tony, who doesn’t have their skills. It would be interesting for Bucky, and Jason might find it amusing, but the structures of various heights, the scalable maze, the hidden targets and the climbing walls, the catwalk that wasn’t built to handle someone of Jason’s weight, all of it was built for them, for the two of them, together.

                They spend hours down there, chasing each other, playing tag, practicing exactly the sort of flashy, dubiously practical moves that Coulson would advise against, if he were around. Tony stops by and sets loose a pair of flying robots that analyze and adapt to their fighting style and, occasionally, launch foam darts at their heads. Natasha and Clint leave the destroyed, bashed-apart robots on Tony’s desk, and he seems genuinely thrilled by their work, makes a loop of their second kill, when Clint’s arrow clips the rotor blades just enough to send the robot off-kilter and Natasha leaps from the catwalk, slams the thing into a climbing wall and smashes it apart.

                Clint’s affection is a steady, barbless thing. Tony’s is a baited trap that only springs if you balk. Either one of them would be hurt by rejection, but Tony seems likely to nurse it. Natasha should tell him that the surest way to avoid rejection is to stop making yourself vulnerable, but she can’t think of a way to phrase it that he won’t read as a condemnation.

                “Thank you,” she says, instead, when he’s late for dinner and she’s come down to his workshop to fetch him up.

                “Oh, yeah, whatever,” he says, with a shrug. “I like puzzles.”

                “That’s true,” she says. “That’s not why you did it. There are more profitable puzzles.” He’s uncomfortable, eyes skittering away from her. She waits until, finally, he looks up at her. “Thank you.”

                “Well,” Tony says, with a helpless shrug. “What’re friends for?”

                _Friends_ , she thinks. He’s not her team. They do not work together. He’s a civilian, and, whatever she is, she will never in her life be a civilian.

                Tony Stark sets out his generosity, his loudness, his charm as a trap. He waits for it to ensnare careless people, who use his good will against him. He _wants_ to be betrayed, because he understands it, and people play out the relationships they know, because they think, rightfully or not, that knowledge gives them some kind of control.

                Natasha resolves not to betray him. She is contrary enough to not ever want to be predictable. Beyond that, he doesn’t deserve it. He’s not that different from Clint, really. They both need looking after, and she is not, at present, pursuing any kind of higher goal.

 

 

 

                On the fourth day of their stay at Stark’s house, the last day before Jason, Bucky, and Coulson are meant to arrive, Natasha sneaks out of Clint’s bedroom and finds a strange man in the hallway.

                “Oh,” he says, with a warm smile and an assessing look, “you must be one of Tony’s guests.”

                “Hi,” she says, with a bright grin of her own. This man is not Jarvis, the imminently competent butler, and he doesn’t carry himself like a member of the security team or household staff. She wants to tell him it’s too early in the morning for a suit, but he wears it like a man who almost never wears anything else. “Yeah, Tony invited us over for the holidays. Who’d pass on that? This place is beautiful.”

                “Yes,” the man says. His mannerisms are deliberately understated; he’s practiced blending in, but there’s a focus in his eyes that gives him away. He’s paying entirely too much attention to her. “The Starks love beautiful things.”

                It’s an innocuous comment. He’s an innocuous man. Natasha has met men like him before.

                She files herself down to something cheerful and sweet, smiles up at him like the comment doesn’t register at all. Behind her, Clint’s bedroom door clicks open, and he steps into the hallway, still in his boxers, blinking curiously and not entirely happily at the man standing outside.

                “Nat?” Clint says, narrowing his eyes a little. “What’s going on? Thought you were getting coffee.”

                “Met someone,” Natasha calls back. She throws a blinding smile Clint’s way, and he hesitates for less than half a second before stepping up beside her, winding an arm around her waist. “Sorry,” Natasha says, turning back to the man in the suit, “I missed your name.”

                “Obadiah,” the man says, every edge dropping away. He grins, knowing and indulgent, like a fond uncle meeting his nephew’s newest mistake, and offers a hand, subtly but intentionally angled toward Clint rather than her. “Friend of the family.”

                “Right,” Clint says, and shakes Obadiah’s hand. “I’m Clint.”

                “Natasha,” Natasha says, and weathers the obnoxiously gentle handshake with another vapid smile. “Always great to meet a friend of the Starks.”

                Twenty minutes later, she and Clint are huddled together around the coffeemaker in the kitchen. Clint’s wearing one of her hoodies and the pair of sweatpants she’d stolen from him months ago. He’s grumpy and sleepy, shoulders curled in and chin dropped almost to his chest.

                “Just _super_ to meet you,” he says, in a terrible imitation of the voice she’d used on Obadiah. “What a _swell_ suit, sir. No, no, it’s totally appropriate for seven in the morning. Hold my hand a couple seconds longer. That’s not weird. You look _great_.” He huffs into his coffee and turns a dark look in the direction the man had headed, down to Tony’s lab. “Fucking creep.”

                It hits like a kick in the chest, the way it can, sometimes, when he does something that catches her off-guard. She cannot find the limits for the fondness she has for him. She doesn’t know what that means.

                She elbows him, and he grumbles as his coffee sloshes perilously close to the rim. “My hero,” she says, and she can’t quite twist her voice into the appropriate level of mocking.

                “Yeah, yeah,” he says, elbowing her back, “I love you, too.”

 

 

 

                It is, she thinks, Maria’s idea that they all go shopping. “We’ll leave the boys to it,” she says, neglecting to specify what _it_ is as she smiles benevolently across the table at Tony, and Clint, and Obadiah in turns.  

                “Oh, God, Mom, what if he tries to talk business?” Tony says, feigning horror. “Mom, it’s almost Christmas.”

                “You’ve been dodging me for weeks, Tony,” Obadiah says. “I had to come out here personally to get this done.”

                “Sounds like I’m not needed,” Clint says, eyes moving between Tony and Obadiah. “I love shopping. Let’s go.”

                Clint hates shopping. Natasha knows this. She smirks at him, but she says nothing. She’d keep worse secrets for him.

                “Clint,” Maria says, apologetically, “it’s a girls’ trip. I’m afraid you don’t qualify.”

                “Sorry, Barton,” Hill says, sounding not at all apologetic. “Why don’t you do some of those physical therapy exercises that you’ve absolutely been doing every day we’ve been here?”

                Natasha cannot leave the Stark residence without Hill, and neither can Clint. He shoots her a resigned look, and Natasha tries to promise, with her eyes, that she will bring him back something nice. He heaves a heavy sigh.

                “If anyone needs me,” he says, “I’m gonna be negotiating more cookies from Jarvis.”

 

 

 

                The attack comes almost immediately after they park the car. Maria’s driver is shot in the head before he’s fully out of the vehicle, and Natasha hears the shot that hits Hill, but she doesn’t see it, because she’s too busy dragging Maria back into the car.

                The car doesn’t offer much protection, and men are pulling Maria away from her before she has a chance to regroup.

                She should go to Hill. She knows that. Hill might still be alive, and Natasha could save her, or at least take her sidearm, but she goes out of the car after Maria Stark instead.

                This, she thinks, is the price of spending too much time with civilians. You lose the ability to prioritize appropriately.

                There are at least three men, and she knows they have guns. She makes herself trip over the frame of the car as she exits, and she takes the hard fall on her left shoulder. It hurts, leaves her left arm stinging, and she hopes that Tony wasn’t lying about the tracking chip in her arm sounding an alarm when damaged.

                “Who the hell is she?” One of the men asks, as Natasha climbs slowly to her feet, uses the handful of seconds to clock the locations of the men.

                “Doesn’t matter,” the shortest one says. “Handle it.”

                 “She’s my personal assistant,” Maria says. One of the men has an arm around her and a gun to her head, and Natasha can see from here that Maria is shaking, but her voice is steady.

                 “You should let her go,” Maria says.

                Every one of these Starks, Natasha thinks, is braver than their bodies are ready for. Every single one is constantly thinking their way into the kind of danger their bodies aren’t prepared to survive.

                Maria must think this is a kidnapping. Natasha can see how that would make sense. Maria is worth an incredible amount of money. Natasha can’t even put a limit on what Tony would pay to keep his mother safe.

                But these kidnappers have already killed at least one person, and none of them are wearing masks. Natasha knows an execution when she sees one. She’s planned enough of them to know the signs, even if she can’t understand why anyone would want Maria Stark dead.

                “I’m hurt,” Natasha says, hollowly, bringing a hand away from the scrape on her arm. There’s a bit of blood on it. She stares at it like it horrifies her and then raises her eyes to the blood-and-brains mess of the driver, and she screams.

                “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” one of the men says, and steps over, raising his gun.

                “ _Natasha_ ,” Maria says, loud and shrill.

                Natasha never wanted to do this again, but the memory of it was never far away. She’s spent months pretending to be something else, but not even Clint and Coulson can change her nature.

                She breaks the man’s arm in two places as she takes the gun away from her, but he doesn’t have long to worry about it. She shoots him in the temple a second after she shoots one of his companions in the chest, twice. She swivels to face the third man, the one holding Maria Stark, and she can see the calculations passing behind his eyes.

                Right before he opens his mouth to threaten Maria, someone shoots him in the head, bullet smashing into his skull above one ear and punching a hole through the other side. He falls backwards, and Natasha walks up, shoots him again, just for scaring Tony Stark’s mother, for making Maria see who Natasha is, when she isn’t playing polite.

                When she turns around, Hill is standing, braced against the car, gun held out in front of her. “Son of a bitch,” Hill says, sounding winded, “call an ambulance.”

                Distantly, Natasha can hear sirens. She carefully puts the gun on the ground and curls her hand around her arm, over the broken tracking chip. “I think,” she says, “that Tony already did.”

 

 

 

                The paramedics take Hill to the hospital, and a fatherly SHIELD agent from the L.A. branch of SHIELD takes Natasha’s statement and then drives her and Maria back to the Stark house.

                “You be careful,” the agent says, as Natasha climbs out of the car. “And tell Phil Coulson I said hey.”

                “Sure,” Natasha says. She watches Maria climb out of the car, and, seconds later, Tony slams out of the front door of the house. “Thanks,” she adds, a little distantly, as she steps out of the car and shuts the door behind her.

                “Mom,” Tony says, and Natasha can’t even look at him. She wishes she hadn’t heard him. She’s going to hear that in her head every time she dreams about the gun to Maria Stark’s head, every time her brain rewrites the fight so that Natasha was too slow or too out of practice.

                “Mom,” Tony says again, and Natasha feels herself flinch. “Fucking Christ, are you---”

                “Fine, Tony,” she says, and Natasha tracks the two of them, running up the driveway to collide on the stairs, arms around each other.

                “Nat,” Clint says. There’s worry in his voice, but not the same kind. She can stand to hear him, and she can look at the pinched, concerned expression on his face. He jogs down the front stairs, looking her up and down.

                “No injuries,” she reports.

                “That’s good,” he says. He stops right in front of her. “Not really what I’m worried about, but good.”

                She blinks at him. “What else is there to worry about?”

                He sighs and wraps his hands carefully her shoulders, pulls her in so he can lean his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry,” he says, quietly. “I know you didn’t want to do that again.”

                She hadn’t minded. There had been one troublesome moment afterward, when she looked down and noticed a bit of blood on the sleeve of her coat. Some small, young part of her had cried out at that, but it had been easy enough to silence.

                A more significant part of her had crowed in victory when the bodies dropped to the concrete. There is, she thinks, some kind of monster inside her. Maybe there always has been. And she could suffocate that monster with rules and regulations, with shopping trips and SHIELD dinners and training sessions. She could kill it. She’s killed stronger, meaner monsters before.

                “I liked it.”

                Clint draws in a breath, and she’s staring right at him, right in his eyes, waiting for him to draw back or flinch away. He doesn’t. He looks sad, but also like he understands. She thinks, under all that sweetness, he has a monster of his own to feed. She thinks they might be the same species.

                “I could start working again,” she tells him. “The right people, the right reasons. I could do it. I want to do it.”

                He smiles, and there’s an edge of regret in that eyes, but there’s something pleased, too. It’s nice, she knows, not to be alone.

 

 

 

                Coulson has to file approximately fifty different forms, but Natasha is given a uniform and field agent status by February 1. The whole team is called up the day after that, and Natasha is flattered that they waited for her.

                “Nervous?” Bucky asks her, as she steps onto the jet.

                “Ready,” she says.

                “Glad you’re here, Red,” Jason says, with a slow, wicked smile. “No one on this team knows how to have any Goddamn fun.”

                “We’re not here to have fun, Jason,” Coulson says. He looks up from the report in his hands with an exceptionally serious frown, and he does not seem at all impressed by the wink Jason sends his way. “We’re here to take down an arms dealer and his three closest associates.”

                “ _Fun_ ,” Jason repeats, stubbornly.

                She settles into her seat and checks her knives, and her guns, and her medical kit. Clint sits beside her and tips his head back, is asleep almost before the jet takes off.

                Natasha looks at all of them in turn. Clint, and Coulson, and Jason, and Bucky.

                She left this kind of work behind. She tried to wash her hands clean. She knows now that she can’t change her nature. It doesn’t matter if she was born this way or made this way; she is what she is. And the best way to protect the people she cares about is to put herself between them and anyone who wants to take them away from her.

_There was good in me, and he found it. I think he can find it in you._

_You can do good, without being good._

                With this team, for this team, she’s ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, sorry this is a day late! I spent most of the holiday in a place without internet access. 
> 
> This is the final chapter of Your Way Up to the Light. Next up, I'll be completing Shake the Devil, but then I'll be coming back to this verse. I think the next fic in this verse will probably involve the (always ill-advised) kidnapping of Tony Stark.
> 
> If you want to make sure you catch the updates, follow me on tumblr [here](https://thepartyresponsible.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! You are all amazing.


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